Dreams of Urbicand

I recently had a restless night where I kept dreaming of a black and white comic that I had I once read where a lattice kept growing in and around a city. When I woken up, I figured that I wouldn’t be able to figure out that distant and vague memory was about.

Nope. Two google searches later and I figured out that I had been dreaming of Fever in Urbicand by Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peters. (It’s also been published as The Fever in Urbicande)

Way back in high school, I had read it piecemeal in back issues of Cheval Noir, a Dark Horse comics anthology that reprinted European comics. It was printed in six chapters and I ended up not reading all of them in order since I read them when I could find a back issue.

I learned at that time that it was part of a larger series called Les Cites obscures, stories where architecture and geography and urbanization are used as key components to convey the story. The series is actually larger than I had realized and also includes a movie and at least one art installation. However, from what I can tell, a lot of it has never been released in English. (In fact, I relied on scans and memory to revisit Fever in Urbicand)

Of course, so much media ends up in English, it feels petty to complain lol

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Urbicand is a literally divided city where the elite live on one side of the river and the poors all live on the other side with only two bridges connecting them. And Urbicand is a mashup up of Jules Verne aesthetic and the 1927 Metroplis movie. A mysterious lattice made of an indestructible material that can grow through solid objects without damaging them engulfs the city, connecting everyone and transforming the city.

To be brutally honest, as a concept and a pretty obvious social metaphor, Fever in Urbicand wouldn’t be unusual if it were a written work. And it would fit in with the science fiction anthologies that Marvel and DC published before devoting themselves to superheroes.

However, the comic story would be ten pages long. Fever in Urbicand is much bigger than that in length. It explores the changes the network makes to the city, particularly the political ones. And while the work ends on a mysterious note, with the network growing again until it is presumably bigger than the planet but out of Urbicand, that ambiguity has weight. 

The story does have a point-of-view character, the master architect Robick. Who takes being a passive observer to such an extent that his friends Thomas the political opportunist and Sophie the madame-turned-political-radical comment on it. (Indeed, by the end, instead of Robick being the middle ground between them, they represent one side and Robick the other) However, Robick anchors the reader and even he is changed by the newtwork by the end.

However, the two most important characters are Urbicand and the network. Visually, they dominate the story. Two dueling (?) structures and their interactions drive the plot. And, damned if the art work isn’t beautiful and would look at home in a museum. Urbicand is a vision of precision and control while the network is a power outside of that control.

Fever in Urbicand left enough of an impression that I dreamed about it decades after I last read it. The story itself is an ultimately simple social parable but the artwork is magnificent. It’s not perfect but it has impact.