Baku #1

Grégoire Carlé's *Baku* arrives from L'Association with a cover that immediately signals something beautifully strange: a intricate ornamental frame — woven from vines, orange blossoms, skulls, a perched bird, a serpentine eel, and an octopus cresting the top — encircles a stark, ink-hatched landscape of jagged rocks and twisted bare trees, with a lone tiny figure perched atop a boulder. The two-tone palette of burnt orange and black gives the whole composition an almost woodblock-print quality, elegant and unsettling in equal measure. If this first volume is any indication, *Baku* is the kind of comics work that rewards slow, careful looking — right from its very cover.