Thanks to Harvey Weinstein, I have not seen Bong Joon-Ho’s
Snowpiercer movie yet, based on the 1982 French graphic novel La
Transperceneige. But I have been able to read the comic, thanks to Titan, who
will be releasing its first-ever English translation on January 28th. If you’re
at all interested in the movie or just in reading one of Europe’s best comics, I
highly suggest climbing aboard.
If you’ve seen the trailers for the movie, you know the deal:
The earth has succumbed to a new ice age, and the last remnants of humanity
live on a single train called the Snowpiercer, which travels the world thanks
to its perpetual motion engine. The train is 1,001 cars long, and the lower
classes live crammed together in squalor in the back of the train, while the
upper classes live is space and luxury in the front.
Snowpiercer is hardly the first story to examine a classist
dystopia, but what makes it unique is its refusal to adhere to any of its
predecessors’ conventions. Proloff is an escapee from the back, who managed a
dangerous trek outside of the train to literally advance his life, but he’s not
trying to lead a revolution or improve his people’s lot. Adeline is a socially
conscious woman from the middle-class who hopes to improve the lives of the
people at the tail, but her plans are instantly derailed when her contact with
Proloff forces her into quarantine. It won’t surprise anyone to known that the
upper classes hate and fear the people at the rear of the train, and have some
diabolical plans for them, but the fact remains that in a certain sense the
lower class is literally threatening not just the society of the Snowpiercer,
but the lives of everyone on board.
But it’s definitely not your standard tale of social equality triumphing
over a discriminatory future world, because it’s augmented by how wonderfully real
yet weird the Snowpiercer is. As
Proloff and Adalind journey through the train — a process that takes several
days — they pass through cars full of zealots who worship the trains engine, a
brothel car for the upper class, and most disturbingly, a car for “Mama” — a
giant, living, regenerative protein that feeds the train’s inhabitants. And that’s to say nothing of the looks into the lives of the people who live on board, in all sections of the train (or the secrets of the Snowpiercer itself).
This combination of the mundane and the bizarre, well-trod
dystopian scifi tropes, and Snowpiercer’s abandoning of the standard
“hero-overthrows-the-evil-regime” plot, combines to make it not just an
excellent comic and an engrossing read, but one that feels like it was written
yesterday instead of 32 years ago. Author Jacques Lob has made Snowpiercer
truly timeless, and while Jean-Marc Rochette’s black-and-white art, full of
marvelously expressive faces yet evocatively minimal backgrounds, establishes the
harsh reality of life onboard a single train almost perfectly (it can be hard
to keep track of some of the lesser characters sometimes, especially the
multitude of similarly faced guards and soldiers).
If you’re a scifi fan or a comic fan, I highly recommend picking
up Snowpiercer Vol. One: The Escape; while the first volume is what Bong
Joon-Ho’s movie seems to be primarily based on, Titan will release the two
other volumes in the Snowpiercer saga later this year (these were written by Benjamin
Legrand and published in 1999-2000, after Lob’s passing). Certainly it’s a
marvelous entry into the genre, and one of Europe’s finest comics works. And if
nothing else, it’ll give you something to read until the movie finally makes
its way over here.
