Incidents in the Night, Book One by David B. Review

An obscure series of books called Incidents in the Night captures David B’s attention and his pursuit in collecting them sends him on a bizarre journey that involves bloodthirsty 19th century oiks, booksellers who dress up as yetis, immortality, and the Angel of Death itself. At the centre of it all? The mysterious Emile Travers and his insane plan to put Napoleon Bonaparte back on the throne!

David B doesn’t produce bad comics but he does occasionally put out some decidedly average ones, particularly when he’s doing another dream-like story, which is the case with Incidents in the Night, Book One.

The story is framed as a dream so almost everything that happens in the book follows dream-logic, aka pure random chaos. Which makes the narrative a bit scattershot and unfocused, as well as lightweight (ie. anything can happen and nothing really means anything), but at least makes for an unpredictable and imaginative story.

I enjoyed most everything about the strange figure of Travers and his bonkers backstory. It’s dark, it’s interesting, and I love the menacing design of the character and the occult weirdness around the letter “N”. The bibliophile in me liked how much of the story takes place inside bookshops though the idea of achieving immortality through books (that is, writing/publishing/reading them) is a banal one for David B to make.

If you’ve read the creator before, his art style here is unchanged from those other books. That is, it’s black and white, very thickly 2D and almost woodcut-like in appearance. It’s unusual but I like his art.

Some parts of the book are plain boring like Mister Lhom’s rambling story recounting the Biblical story of the flood that didn’t add anything and went on for too long. Ditto the odd tangent on extinct megafauna. Still, David B finds firm footing with the story towards the end of this volume, leaving readers with a tantalising cliffhanger for the second and final book.

It’s uneven with some parts dull and some parts compelling, but there’s enough creative and unique material in Incidents in the Night, Book One to make it worth checking out for fans of this creator.