To readers of this website who are just discovering his work now and who think that maybe Hans has put out both of these books recently, a little reality check: that’s not the case. This second volume was at least a decade after the first, and he’s been working on it since 2014. If you’d told me that he spent about a month on each panel of this almost 200 page behemoth, based on the frankly absurd amount of detail in each image, I’d absolutely believe you. Just a gorgeous book from start to finish, full of beautifully detailed horrors. Should I tell you about the story? Fine, but this really is one of those cases where the art alone could carry the book. Things start off in almost a straightforward fashion: there’s a lone figure wearing a bear mask, crawling through the wreckage of civilization, hunting for a bird. He successfully knocks a bird out of the sky, cuts it open… and then removes a key from the carcass, which he uses to open up his own face. Yep, for a page or two there I was almost fooled that this was a typical post-apocalyptic story. Nope! We go inside his open face and see a character (that is soon named Fronky by Cochlea and Eustachia) who is clearly looking for something. He pulls two husks out of filing cabinets, plugs them into a device of some kind, and out come our heroes! Well, one of them, anyway. She has to pull her twin out of her husk, as she doesn’t really want to leave it. And, considering what happens to both of them throughout the book, she had the right instincts. The mystery of their origin is revealed, in case (like me) you were still curious from the last volume. Which has almost nothing to do with this one, in case you were wondering if you had to read them in order like I did. Anyway! Fronky was incapacitated somehow, and they manage to extract a black bubble from him. Which they then crack open, revealing an armadillo, which they then spend a lot of time chasing, and which figures into the overall plot pretty heavily. From there… you know, me going over this point by point doesn’t help either of us. There’s a giant with a globe for a head who’s hunting the twins, there’s a room full of exact duplicates of Cochlea and Eustachia, there’s a creep who’s using versions of them to power his vehicle, one of them loses an eye, and just about every oddity in this world is hunting them. Small details in panels are paid off beautifully down the line, and it somehow all ties together nicely. There’s a lot more nudity in this one than the previous volume, but it’s not like I’d call either of these appropriate for all ages. If you’re a fan of the odd and almost inexplicable (that somehow all makes sense in the end), I couldn’t recommend these two books highly enough. $36 (or get both volumes for a discounted price of $56)
