Staff Picks (October): The Night (La Nuit) HC

I admit it.

I had never read Druillet before.

Don’t throw things at me, I’m a 90’s kid who grew up on Hellblazer and X-Men! Nobody ever handed me Lone Sloane. The first time I’d ever heard of Druillet was in the pages of Warren Ellis’ Do Anything. This is definitely new territory for me.

I was excited when Titan announced that they were going to do a re-release of La Nuit. It seemed like a good starting point; a stand-alone book that I could chew on and think about.

Boy, can I pick ‘em. Talk about jumping off the high dive and into the deep end.

La Nuit is, on the surface, an apocalyptic tale of biker gangs fighting to survive in a world that no longer belongs to them. Their ways are outdated and outlawed, and they struggle to hold their place while “kopfs” and “whitefaces” take over the surface world above them. Traditionally enemies, the gangs band together in an attempt at preservation and go on a journey to The Blue Depot to obtain more drugs.

The dialogue is stilted, angry (aside from a rousing rendition of “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones), and endlessly, affectingly repetitive. Every panel, every splash page is at war for your attention; every page wants to be your favorite page.

From go, reading La Nuit does feel like you’re just not taking enough drugs to truly appreciate it, but Druillet wrote this in response to his wife’s passing, and it shows. It is chaotic, to be sure, and weird is putting it lightly, but underneath that, at the heart of it all, this book is about being afraid.

“Til now, I’ve Sh*t on death’s jackboots…and now I am afraid…”

Aren’t we all.

If you’ve ever grieved a loved one’s passing, this book will resonate with you. The struggle to really accept that the universe makes no sense, and that everything has its time and everything dies bleeds through as you keep reading. It feels like there’s a vibrant, rage-filled beating heart beneath each page. As the bikers keep spiraling toward what is surely their demise, that heartbeat seems to get faster, and more urgent and more fearful.

La Nuit is a beautifully rendered reminder that everything ends, and time comes for us all.

— Leigh Tyberg

Publisher: Titan Comics
Item Code: OCT181927
Release Date: 3/20/19
SRP: $24.99