Good comics (and books)

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Today, a new comic book titled "world without end" is available on the forum.


This comic book tells an insightful story about the energy and climate challenges facing our world today. Is this the end of the world? Perhaps not yet... With humor and intelligence, "World Without End" is the fruit of a years-long collaboration between two of the most accomplished contemporary figures in comics and climate research. Together, Christophe Blain ("Quai d'Orsay," Dargaud) and Jean-Marc Jancovici (Carbone 4, The Shift Project) explore our dependence on fossil fuels, the profound changes our planet is undergoing, and the resulting consequences for society as a whole. The dream of endless economic growth might be an illusion... but that doesn't mean we are doomed to destruction, if we take the necessary steps today. A candid and empathetic analysis that leaves readers with a better understanding of today's world and where we go from here.


Link: https://mega.nz/file/BVtUwKBB#8he_D6PFzg9gftefyyShnlW-c8N_SHwJsToi3PqtQf8

[scarface]

Note that a new episode of Thorgal is available on the forum: Neokora


Back from the island of Kalsoy, Thorgal, Jolan and Louve have the unpleasant surprise to find Aaricia and the rest of the village under the influence of a bondage spell...



Link: https://mega.nz/folder/EUs0BRqI#GEzq0IA2LoHP6lOiw-hAyQ

[scarface]

Tonight, a new comic book, titled "Maybe this Tuesday", is available on the forum.


Achilles, a man in his forties, has just buried his parents. He likes to sit on the beach below his house and watch the passing ships heading for the high seas. So much so that one evening he falls asleep sitting on his chair with both feet firmly buried in the sand. However, when he awakes he is unable to move: during the night he has literally taken root. As a huge storm brews over his island, a seagull flies towards him. The seagull, which can talk, informs Achilles on which day of the week he will die: a Tuesday. But which one? That's the question. Fortunately today is a Wednesday. The tide is rising and will soon flood the beach. If the seagull is telling the truth Achilles needs to uproot himself quickly to avoid drowning. It would appear that the time has come for him to cease contemplating passing ships...


Link: https://mega.nz/file/EQNmyDrb#dUNgTT5jYBbsWisbULZqmJ4U8L_JhBtcon3EGribGv0

[scarface]

Tonight, a new comic book, titled Paris 2119, is available on the forum.


In the year 2119, instantaneous transportation technology has altered almost every facet of human civilization, improving countless industries and practices while also leaving behind a growing population who can't afford to keep up. But some people still prefer the traditional ways of getting from point A to point B, including Tristan Keys, a writer who refuses to embrace the technological advances everyone finds so mandatory. When tiny cracks start to appear in the world around him, he has to wonder if he hasn't been a pawn of technology all along...


Link: https://mega.nz/file/9VMXlBgL#_Ho28y9yCK8Sl6LrgbvJppyPTPGCXi7aQzLb9toK1_4

[scarface]

Tonight, a new comic book series, titled the shadows of Salamanca, is available on the forum.

With "Sarah", Christophe Bec is definitely emerging as a high-class writer, able to keep the reader in suspense from the first to the last page, like Stephen King in literature. Remarkably imaged by Italian Stefano Raffaele, "Sarah" arises immediately as a reference: in the register of fear, never cartoon series had indeed placed as high voltage!.

Sarah followed her husband, ranger, in a remote area of Pennsylvania. Their new house is beautiful, but the city of Salamanca is not very welcoming and the people are not more. But isolation does not frighten Sarah, she even seems to need, for a while at least. To find peace and escape the torment, Salamanca however may not be the ideal place.

Link: https://mega.nz/folder/YMESCSKb#Il9L-U-SKnS4Z2EAQxkg-g

[scarface]

Note that a new episode of Thorgal is available on the forum: Tupilaqs


Thorgal had a chance to destroy the Atlantean spaceship and its weapons, but couldn't bring himself to do it, as it also would have meant sacrificing Jolan. His aborted attempts, however, activated Neokora, the onboard AI. First contact was immediately hostile, and the two Vikings were soon forced to flee both the machine, as well as the last survivors of the crew, long thought dead but now awakening. Including Slive the Sorceress, Thorgal's one-time ally, turned enemy...


Link: https://mega.nz/folder/EUs0BRqI#GEzq0IA2LoHP6lOiw-hAyQ

[scarface]

Today, I' going to present 2 books.
They are not available in English, only in French, but maybe some of you have already read them.


The Tragedy of the President - Scenes from Political Life (1986-2006), written by Franz-Olivier Giesbert.
The journalist, who in 1987 published a biography of J. Chirac, Mayor of Paris and Prime Minister, looks back on his political career since then, based on interviews with the President of the Republic, his relatives, his political friends and his critics.
Although fascinating, The President's Tragedy is a bit nauseating. These actors seem to be at the antipodes of all notions of general interest. Politics, in the noble sense of the term, is swept away by base tactics. Only the short term emerges, the obsession with power and a disillusioned vision of a France shown as irreformable and destined to decline.





1914: the great illusion, written by Jean-Yves Le Naour.
In 1914, the obsession with war haunted Europe. Even before the Sarajevo attack ignited the fuse in the Balkan powder keg, it occupied people's minds, appeared on the front pages of the newspapers, invited itself into conversations and political speeches. Without anyone actually believing it. However, in just a few days, the world is thrown into a spiral that will crush it. War imposes itself as the quickest solution to lead to the emancipation of nationalities and the advent of a new world.
But Pandora's box is open and the infernal machine launched: for four long years, the war will become global, total and terrorist. In the light of the most recent research, combining diplomatic, military, social and cultural approaches, Jean-Yves Le Naour makes us relive the year 1914 as closely as contemporaries experienced it. This first volume of an ambitious series renews in depth the history of the Great War.

[scarface]

Today, I'm going to present the book L'Empire éclaté.
The Exploded Empire is a book by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, an international specialist of the USSR, and published in 1978 by Flammarion



Its title, and even more the "exploded" image that illustrates it, dramatizes to excess a book that marks both the rigor and the prudence of the historical approach. It appears that the break-up is at most potential. The fact that the explosives have been in place for so long could be, all in all, reassuring about the explosion, if they had not been suddenly reactivated in recent years, and according to a dynamic capable of upsetting the future.

A confirmed historian of the Soviet Union, Mrs. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse excels here in describing the constant design which, since 1917, has animated the leaders, through oppositions, contradictions, twists and turns, the spectacular aspects of which may have deceived the observer ; superficial. At the moment when he opened the "prison of the peoples" that was the empire of the tsars, Lenin seized the opportunity to put the nationalities, about which he cared little, at the service of the proletarian revolution, which was in no way the engine of these uplifted nations. The empire, then, did break up. But Lenin saw in these free and equal nations — including the Russian nation — a necessary stage, however long it would take, towards their spontaneous decline. The future would show what is involved in this withering away, as in that of the State.

On the eve of his death, Lenin had a desperate vision of what was going to be this reality officially called (the revealing word was his) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Dominant nation, total state: the Stalinist enterprise has begun. It will find its crowning moment after the war: the Russian Empire is reconstituted. The author expresses in a pithy way a process which can be clearly read in the evolution of official history: "absolute evil", imperial colonization becomes "relative evil", then "lesser evil", if not necessary evil, to become, by a sudden mutation, an "absolute good". This is the moment when Stalin proclaims the victory of the "Russian people" (and not of the Soviet people) and consents to this grandiose admission that, if he had been a severe judge and not a lenient father, he "should have deported the entire Ukrainian people": forty million individuals.

Violent, brutally constraining, contrary to every socialist principle in its method, it was nonetheless always the unitary thought of Lenin. Khrushchev will take it up again in its initial purity with the theory of the "blossoming" of nations, then of their "rapprochement";, finally of their "fusion": an outcome which is itself confused with the completion of communism.

This ideal vision and this doctrine, taken up by the successors, remain, until today, the official line of power. With this difference that the step-nations, federalism, have become more formal than ever, notably in the Constitution of 1977. The "change of nature" announced by Khrushchev is deemed accomplished, and everything is based on the ceaselessly proclaimed existence of the united and unique "Soviet people". The historian regrets that the "incantation", the insistence of which betrays in those who engage in it the "disarray" and even the "panic", is unfortunately not enough to produce the fact. And she is obliged to see the Soviet peoples, who not only subsist but assert themselves vigorously.
The author focuses on a very thorough analysis of the elements and forces likely to promote integration or strengthen nations. First on Georgia, an old "rebel", to the Georgian people who are shown to us to be resistant to any Russification, and who are characterized by their impulsive mood, a tad anarchist, their "rebellious spirit", their "southern fantasy": in short, the robot portrait of a certain Georgian nicknamed Stalin.

Mrs. Carrère d'Encausse goes to the heart of the problem by questioning peoples whose religion is indissolubly linked to national identity. And if this religion is not only belief and practice, but a way of life and philosophy of existence. Such is Islam indeed. But Soviet Islam, forced to adapt to the strict Soviet rule, instead of allowing itself to be integrated, integrated it itself, in such a way that it made communism a "by-product of Islam". And now, through the still mythical "homo sovieticus",emerges an immutable and new "homo islamicus".

To measure the significance of this phenomenon, it is necessary to read the study of comparative demography on which the book is based. Basically, general decline, in particular of the Russian group, in the face of an accelerated growth of the Muslim group: eighty million in the next few years. If we add the sixty million from Ukraine and the Caucasus, to stick to them alone... "The national question, which Khrushchev said was solved, is now a demographic question. »


Like Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik in 1970 in "Will the Soviet Union Survive in 1984?" and sociologist Emmanuel Todd in 1976 in "The final fall", Hélène Carrère d'Encausse predicted accurately the near end of the USSR. However, unlike these two predecessors, she writes that the USSR will break under the pressure of the rise of the Asian republics of the USSR with high birth rates, in opposition to the republics of Eastern Europe with low fertility rates. According to this reasoning, the population of Muslim origin would have become the majority in the Soviet Union while the ruling class of the Party, the Army and industry was very largely of Russian origin, therefore of European culture. This distortion would necessarily have posed a problem of legitimacy of political power.

It turns out History invalidated this theory, since the Soviet Union's challenge actually came first from Poland in August 1980 with the creation of the Solidarność trade union, then from the Baltic countries in July 1989, to protest against the German-Soviet pact of 1939, and finally from East Germany in October 1989, which led to the fall of the Wall, on November the 9th.