François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, the authors of the cartoon series The Cities of the Fantastic (Les Cités Obscures) who includes the two volumes of La Frontière Invisible about which a first article was recently published on this site, will be present at the BnF (Site François Mitterrand) for two meetings with their public on Thursday, April…
Fred passed away yesterday and everyone is sad : Philémon, Barthélémy, Anatole, the Manu Manu and all of those who loved Fred and his logically crazy / madly logical poetic universe, always and never following him « to the letter » should we say. At (e)space & fiction we say good bye to the artist, inventor of…
La frontière invisible is an album of cartoonists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. This album includes two volumes and is part of the series « Les Cités obscures« , literary The Dark Cities but translated to English The Cities of the Fantastic. The book portrays the lives of characters who perceive too late the real challenges and…
Les maîtres cartographes (Mapping Masters) is a series of 6 comic books published between 1992 and 2002, drawn by Paul Glaudel and written by Scotch Arleston. This author is well-known for his large collection of heroic fantasy comic books, including the famous Lanfeust de Troy‘s series. Les maîtres cartographes est une série BD de 6…
Inception is a film written, directed and produced in 2010 by Christopher Nolan. The film tells the story of an « extractor », the hero, who enters the dreams of others to obtain information. Recruited for the sake of his faculties in the field of industrial espionage, the hero has lost his family and had to flee.…
Kafka is a film directed by Steven Soderbergh in 1991. The screenplay mixes events from the life of the Czech German speaking writer and themes of several of his major novels, mainly the absurdity of the world, especially in the context of bureaucracy. The use of black and white in a part of the film…
The Eruption of Karamako is the second volume of The Secret Ray, a volume of the series The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko that Hergé published in 1952. In the book Jo was saved from certain death by a film crew who filmed the eruption of Karamak volcano from a seaplane. The pilot reported…
This famous drawing titled New Yorker map of the World is from Saul Steinberg. The New Yorker published it on its cover on March 29, 1976. It is often seen as a satire of the New Yorkers’ « smug provincialism ». Actually, it is a beautiful and satiric expression of a much more general mental geography. People…
Donjon is a series of satirical fantasy comic books created and supervised by two famous French artists, Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. Many other talented designers have contributed to this collective work: Manu Larcenet, Christophe Blain, Blutch or Andreas. The world of the series is extremely complex and changing, and the question of mapping this…
The Lord of the Rings is the first film of a trilogy directed by Peter Jackson based on the eponymous books of JRR Tolkien. The film relies heavily on cartographic representations of imaginary worlds, among which Middle-earth, the main land where the trilogy takes place. To trace the origins of Middle-earth, we must refer to…
Kiki’s Delivery Service is an animated film directed in 1989 by Hayo Miyazaki, based on a book by Eiko Kadono and illustrated by Akiko Ayashi. The story is about a young witch who, at the age of 13, must leave her home, as all young witches do, and has to go to a new city for…
In 1994 and 1995, the artist and engraver Marc Jurt and the writer Michel Butor initiated an artistic collaboration inspired by maps; all kind of maps : city maps or aerial photographs, world maps or topographic maps, aeronautical maps or meteorological maps. Marc Jurt started with geographical documents and juxtaposed or superimposed engravings or paintings…
About a Mountain is an essay by John d’Agata about nuclear waste issue. The book has another title in the French edition (Yucca Mountain) and the cover represents a face drawn with the traditional cartographic symbols. The illustration does not exist on the original book’s cover. Why ? Publié en 2012 en France, Yucca Montain…
« La cour secrète des Arcanes » is an animation film directed by Pascal Morelli in 2001. This is a free adaptation of one of stories of Corto Maltese, the famous adventurer invented by Italian designer Hugo Pratt. The film includes scenes from several albums, mainly « La maison dorée de Samarkand « . In this album, maps are…
« On the Road » is a film by Walter Salles, adapted from the novel by Jack Kerouac. This film was presented at the 65th Cannes Film Festival and was released on screens on May 23, 2012. Kerouac’s novel, published in 1957, and one of the best known of this author, relate trip Kerouac between the east…
Paris Noir is an anthology of short stories located in Paris and written by French authors. Published in 2008 English as part of the Noir Series of Akashic Books, the original texts are now available in French. The Noir Series bring together all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the…
Il deserto di Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars) shot in 1976 by Valerio Zurlini is a French-German-Italian production. This film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Dino Buzzati. The script is very similar in topic and atmosphere to the novel. It benefits from a good casting and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.…
Un balcon en forêt is a film shot in 1979 by Michel Mitrani from the book of the same title of Julien Gracq, published in 1958 by Editions Jose Corti. This editor published in 2011, Manuscrits de guerre of the same author, written while he lived as a military the few weeks of the German…
Art Spiegelman, creator of the graphic narrative Maus, is the President of the 39th Angoulême International Comics Festival in Angoulême. It is the opportunity to celebrate on (e)space & fiction this exceptional designer by presenting this deeply moving frame issued from page 127 in the first volume of Maus. The road network that forms a…
Here is a seasonal post. Christmas time is for children and children’s stories. It is the perfect moment to present the simple and naive but very effective spatial machinery Jean de Brunhoff imagines when he relates the discovery of the house of Father Christmas by Babar in the album Babar and Father Christmas(1941). It illustrates…
Un bar parfait is a French novel by Jean-Bernard Pouy published in September 2011. A white wine lover goes all over Paris in search of the perfect bar. The One that will offer him better than Cabernet or Sauvignon. He tries one bar after the other, all are different. In this book J.-B. Pouy uses…
Minority Report is a Steven Spielberg film (2002) adapted of the eponymous short story that Philip K. Dick published in 1956. More than fifty years after being written, and although widely modified in the film version, the short story of Dr. K. Dick is still of a troubling modernity. When it was released, the film…
In Tunis, the suburban rail service TGM (Tunis-Goulette-Marsa) leads from the Tunis Marine station to the beaches of La Goulette and Mersah via the very picturesque and touristic village of Sidi Bou Said. Several stations serve the very large site of the ruins of Carthage. The first one is Carthage Salammbô, name that evokes of…
The Little Prince created by Saint-Exupery has become a universal character. Translated into more than 200 languages, the poetic and philosophical tale written by the French aviator touches the hearts of people all around the world. Were you aware he left his planet to materialize on the Earth ? Do you want to know where and…
The X-Men are a group of superheroes created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. There adventures were published in X-Men # 1 by Marvel Comics in September 1963. The book was adapted for three movies released in 2000, 2003 and 2006 (plus a prequel in 2009 telling the story of one of the main characters:…
The latest novel by Michel Houellbecq deals not only with art and society, but also with places and their representations. The title « The map and territory » can be interpreted as a synthesis of the artistic journey of the hero, Jed Martin. The international career of this visual artist starts in the 2010s through a series…
As already shown in this post, geographic space plays a fundamental role in the work of Hergé. In The ‘Manitoba’ No Reply, first volume of The Secret Ray from The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko, published in 1952, the liner SS Manitoba indicates its position by radio, remains silent for 20 hours and send…
As a first example of a local materialization of fiction, we present the cell of Edmond Dantès in the Chateau d’If, near Marseille and, more specifically, the tunnel that this character of the Count of Monte-Christo, novel by Alexandre Dumas, would have made to get Abbé Faria, his prison companion. Le premier exemple de matérialisation…
« Who is the murderer of the subway? Who is this man who pushes innocents under the train? And who are its victims? » Such is the plot of the thriller written by Frederic H. Fajardie in 1982. Police inspector Padovani (recurring character in the work of Fajardie) investigates. During a briefing with his staff, he says:…
In animated films, ways of representing space are unlimited. Everything is possible in an animated cartoon. From the beginning of the 20th century, animated movie makers have been inventing new ways of representing space (e.g. The flying house by Winsor McCay, 1921). Le dessin animé est un domaine dans lequel les formes de représentation de…
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