SERIES OVERVIEW
Imagine another world, a heartbeat, a breath away, and yet at the same time more distant than the farthest star.  You can walk to it without even noticing, just by going through a door in some crooked building, or by day dreaming after having seen a curious painting or read an unusual book.  It is a world of quaint vehicles, wondrous architecture and strange customs.  Like our own world, it has light and darkness in equal measure, and you are never quite sure which prevails at any given moment.

The first Obscure Cities story started in June 1982, when the French periodical (A Suivre) [always written with the parenthesis - it means “to be continued”] published the first installment of Les Murailles de Samaris [The Walls of Samaris].  Since then, this universe has grown tremendously in size and complexity, to a point where even its authors are hard pressed to keep up with their creation!

In fact, it could be argued that the series has acquired a life of its own, something that has been hinted at more than once in the stories.  Fans have been sending suggestions by the cartload and, rather than just dismiss them, Schuiten and Peeters have enthusiastically sought and introduced the best ideas into their albums.  Many of their unseen characters are named after real people who contributed something, lending a definite air of solidity to what would otherwise be just make-believe.

Supposedly published fifty years after the Urbicande events, after the city has been destroyed by an earthquake, the book is written as a scientific rebutal of the existence of the Network, now seen as a collective hallucination or a pure myth. The interesting part is that the copy we get to read comes from the library of the Sixth Hospice of a city called Brüsel, and it has been heavely anoted by a patient named Eugen Robick...

The booklet itself was extremely well done. The cover has a convincing "aged" look, rice paper pages protect illustrations in the maner of ancient prints, and Robick’s note really appear hand-written. Each book came complete with a library card and a separate note from Professor von Scholz, warning the staff not to loan it to Robick...

An intact copy will easely fetch the equivalent of $150 US, when it can be found at all. There are apparently a number of pirated copies on the market, and some of them are close enough to the original to pass as genuine. It has been translated into German, but not yet in English. Most of the illustrations have been reproduced in the 1992 re-edition of La fièvre d‘Urbicande.

L’Archiviste (The Archivist)

In 1987, Casterman was planning a series of large size albums of pictures by famous cartoonists. The idea was that the individual pages could be taken out and used as posters. The concept never really took off, but Schuiten and Peeters were approached in the early stages. At that time, François had already produced a number of pieces for various projects, like this poster for a Public Transport Week in Brussels.

The idea of merely displaying a collection of pictures did not appeal much to the authors, but they saw there an opportunity to consolidate some disparate elements and expand on the universe of the Obscure Cities as a whole. After some discussions with the editor, they managed to have the original layout modified to include text and images on the back of the prints, turning the whole portfolio into a story that stands on its own.

The French term archiviste means not only "archive keeper", but also designates a person who researches old documents. In Europe, where archives have been piling up for over two thousand years, this is a serious job. In this story, we meet Isidore Louis, who is given the task of researching the rumors which have begun to circulate about some mysterious Obscure Cities. Proper documentation is hard to come by, but Isidore manages to find several pieces of interest.

Among those are snippets about Xhystos, Brüsel, Calvani, Roth, Mylos and Alaxis.... True to an habit that was becoming well established, Schuiten and Peeters skillfully mixed references to books already published along with tentalising glimpses of things to come. This treatment of each individual album as a well integrated part of a greater whole accounts for much of the series popularity. L’Archiviste also introduced the concept that the Obscure Cities are somehow alive, feeding our dreams as much as being sustained by them.

La Tour (The Tower)

One of the last documents uncovered in L’Archiviste was a picture entitled "Giovanni and his Friends", showing a man surrounded by a group of famous painters and illustrators. In La Tour, we learn his identity and the nature of his connection with the world of the Obscure Cities.

Giovanni Batista is a maintainer, a lonely man affected to the maintenance of a small part of a building, one so vast that he has never seen the whole of it. One day, Giovanni cannot take it anymore, he leaves his sector to try to find out what is going on outside. Eventually, he reaches a still inhabited zone and meet the scholar Elias Aureolus Palingenius and his ward, Milena. Elias, who is famous for his vast library and his collection of paintings about the Tower, beleives that something omninous is happening to the immense building. Eventually, Giovanni and Milena decide to leave for the distant top floor, where they hope to find the answer. It is a long and difficult journey, and what they find is quite unexpected.

This album was published in black and white, but with a twist: the paintings in Palingenius’ collection are in colour. The inhabitants of the Tower see their world as perfectly normal, but they cannot help but to feel that there is something wonderfully strange about the paintings...

La route d’Armilia (The Road to Armilia)

The first picture in this story are of Mylos, the grim industrial city mentioned in L’Archiviste. We then switch abruptly to the narration of Ferdinand Robur Hatteras, a young boy who has been entrusted with the mission of bringing an important message to the hidden city of Armilia, located at the North Pole of the Obscure World.

We are then treated to a fascinating Zeppelin trip over cliff-hugging Porrentruy, seaside Muhka, sky-scraping Brüsel, opera-crazy Bayreuth, glass-enclosed Calvani, somber Genova, and København of a Thousand Towers. Shortly after takeoff, Ferdinand meets a stowaway girl named Hella Jacobsen, who is fleeing a factory, and quickly befriend her. This album also introduces Axel Wappendorf, the scientist who has since then become another major character in the series.

Strangely, the narration is interrupted every once in a while by images of two inspectors looking for something in the bowels of Mylos. When the two tracks come together, we are left wondering about the thin line between dream and reality...

Le musée A.Desombres (The A.Desombres Museum)

There is a small play on words in that title: said aloud in French, it sounds like "The Museum has Shadows". This is appropriate, because this particular album started as a travelling cartoon exhibit called Le Musée des Ombres (the Museum of Shadows). In addition to their undeniable skills as storytellers, Peeters and Schuiten are also quite talented as scenographes, or designers of exhibitions. It is a demanding craft, that requires balancing artistic vision with the physical demands of the real world. For Le Musée des Ombres, the final setup included a crumbling museum where cartoons were displayed as the last remnant of a forgotten art, of interest only to some few old people... While not specifically centered on the Obscure Cities, the exhibit had many elements reminiscent of that universe, and eventually included a sound play about it.

Out of this concept, Le musée A.Desombres came out in 1990. The handsome folding jacket contains two parts: a catalogue of paintings by a little known turn-of-the-century artist, and a CD soundtrack. The book also included several photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart, who has collaborated extensively with both Schuiten and Peeters.

The catalog is full of references that will be immediatly recognized by people familiar with the Obscure Cities. Some of them are very subtle, and can be understood only by those who already have a deep knowledge of that world.

As it is unlikely that the soundtrack itself will ever be translated, here is a summary of the story:

The play opens with a dedication by a man speaking French with a Dutch accent: Koelber, using an unfamiliar recording device. Follows an art auction where a painting by Desombres reaches a fantastic price. We then hear a conversation between Koelber and his associate about how popular Desombres' work has become, and how mysterious the character was (the name litterally means "of the shadows"). Augustin Desombres is beleived to have committed suicide, but his body was never found.

To find more paintings, Koelber goes to Desombres' last known residence, and finds a crumbly museum where a lone elderly guide stands guard. With a couple of other tourists, the visit starts. Strangely, the lights are controlled by timers and the time allocated to view each painting is strictly limited. One painting fascinates Koelber, that of a young girl with an indistinct face. He stays behind unnoticed and, just as the lights goes out, takes a picture with his flash camera, something the guardian had strictly forbidden.

Gradually, we discover that the paintings are in fact gates to the Obscure World, and that Koelber is stranded in a darkened mansion. Some years ago, Desombres came to the world of the Cities and befriended Mary von Rathen, Eugen Robick and Axel Wappendorf. Since then, they have been trying to open a passage from their side, each for his or her own reason. Mary is obsessed with the idea of visiting our world, Robick dreams of rebuilding it like he did Urbicande, and Wappendorf is fascinated with the scientific aspect of the whole thing.

Koelber falls in love with the voice of Mary, but cannot see her because all the lightbulbs have been removed to allow the paintings to be seen from the Obscure side. Every time the lights are turned on in the Museum, the reverse side of the images becomes visible for them. It seems that the old guardian is in fact Desombres himself, very obsessed with Mary but for some reason he does not want the link between the worlds reestablished.

Eventually, Wappendorf deducts that Koelber went through because the wavelenght of the light generated by his flashbulbs is exactly right to open the doorway. He asks Vigoleis for a bulb so he can analyze it, but there is only one left so Koelber refuses.

Finally, the visitor cannot resist any longer: he has to see the face of Mary. He uses his last flash to get a glimpse, but she was standing next to a painting...

In short, the whole story is a sequel to L'Enfant Penchée, even though it was conceived much earlier. This album is getting increasingly rare, but can still be found in specialized stores. While there are no plans to re-edit the volume as such, Schuiten and Peeters are currently working on a somewhat different version, possibly involving a CD-ROM rather than an Audio Compact Disk.

The publication of this album also had an interesting side effect: there are now people who are quite certain that an artist named Augustin Desombres really lived in the 19th Century...

Brüsel (Brüsel)

To understand this story, it should be known that in the last ten years or so the city of Brussels has seen considerable change. Since it has become the capital of the European Union, the whole town has been subject to frenetic reconstruction. Whole neighbourhoods have been razed to be replaced by modern buildings of questionable taste, to the point where a new term - Bruxellisation - has been coined to describe the loss of architectural treasures to runaway development.

We already knew of Brüsel from previous albums, but had only glanced at it from afar. This time, we are treated to the whole story as to how the city changed from a quiet provincial town to a roaring metropolis. We see the transformation from the perspective of Constant Abeels, a quiet little man who owns a flower shop in one of the older neighbourhoods. We also meet Tina Tonero, an anarchist who pours coffee in computers; Ernest Dersenval, a scientist who has conceived a gigantic hospital; his friend Axel Wappendorf, whom we already know; the shady developper Freddy De Vrouw; and a host of doctors, politicians and other supporting characters.

The full story is actually extremely complex, and copies of that album should be kept handy by anobody wishing to refute the argument that cartoons are fit only for children.

L’Écho des Cités (Echo of the Cities)

While Schuiten and Peeters are best known for their collaboration of the Obscure Cities series, this was not the first time that they had worked together. They both knew each other as teenagers, and published a school newspaper titled GO as early as 1969. L’Écho des Cités was made in fond rememberance of those days, and was a work of pure joy for both authors.

This large size album reproduces select pages from a famous newspaper of the Obscure World, from its first issue to the last one. Covering a period of several years, this collection let us know of major events in the life of the Cities the way its inhabitants learned about them. We discover, for instance, that the Obscure World has its own calendar, that Captain Nemo - or perhaps Jules Verne - has visited a city called Samarobrive, that Robick had people fined or even expelled for making small changes to their houses in Urbicande, that the city of Alta-Plana is devoted entirely to archive keeping, and much much more.

While it is lavishly illustrated, it is the text that occupies an important part in this album. The entire work was entirely, and very skillfully, hand-lettered by Etienne Schreder. Several photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart illustrate the later days of the newspaper.

Mary la Penchée (Leaning Mary)

Published in 1995 as a children’s book, there is more to it than meet the eye at first glance. This is the story of Mary, a young girl who finds herself leaning at a strange angle for no apparent reason.

L’enfant penchée (The Leaning Child)

Published in 1996, this 151 pages black & white album is truly of novelistic proportion. The very well constructed story can be considered a prequel to the events described in Le Musée A.Desombres, but no prior knowledge of the Obscure Cities is required to enjoy it. The images are marvellous in their own right, the plot is fascinating, and the cast of characters is nothing less than grandiose. While visiting an amusement park in Alaxis, young Mary von Rathen suddenly finds herself "leaning" after a mysterious eclipse, as if subjected to the gravity of a world other than her own.

She is quickly considered a rebel for this unacceptable behavior, and sent to a school with strict discipline. She soon after escape to join a circus, where her unusual ability makes her a star attraction. Meanwhile, Obscure scientist secluded in the Mount Michelson Observatory have been building theories about the mysterious eclipse.

Running parallel to those events, we follow the photographic story of Augustin Desombres, an artist from our world who purchases an immense abandonned building in a remote corner of France at the turn of the last Century. The photographs, which have a very nice period feel, were done by Marie-Françoise Plissart.

In the last few pages, we learn that the Mary la Penchée tale is now just considered a children’s story in the Obscure World, and is really a deformed image of the true events...

Three pages, that were cut from the final print in the interest of making the story run smoother, eventually found their way to the Urbicande Web Site.

Le guide des Cités (The Guide to the Cities)

When it came out in 1996, Obscure Cities fans went wild. Here was a book full of the sort of information that fans were looking for. Published in the format of the famous Michelin Green Guide, Le Guide des Cités answers just about any question you care to ask. History, customs, geography, fauna, flora, where to stay, what to do. With this guide, the Obscure World is better covered than many parts of our own "real" planet!

The Guide also heralded the coming of the Cités Obscures on the Web. Each book came with a glossy colour flyer, giving the site’s address ( http://www.urbicande.be ) and asking readers to submit their suggestions for possible points of passage between our two universes. Ideas came in from all over the world, far exceeding the wildest expectations. One hundred handsome Certificates of Passage had been set aside to reward the first contributors, but 140 ended up being distributed, with many fans left wanting: well over five hundred letters had poured in at last count, with more coming. The site itself became one of the most popular in Belgium, and eventually won a prize for its high quality. Be warned that it is not easy to navigate; urbicande.be is as mysterious as the Cities themselves, and just as fascinating.