NBM’s ComicsLit imprint is making the most of France’s higher cultural regard for the comic form in many ways, including signing up some of the country’s finest talent. It’s not just a people thing though: the company is also working with the Louvre (the Parisian museum perhaps most famous for housing the Mona Lisa) on a series of graphic novels inspired by the building and its contents.
This volume, written and illustrated by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, sees an art assessor tasked with the job of auditing the museum’s enormous collection. As if this wouldn’t be hard enough in real life, Mathieu makes the job harder by turning his fictional version of the museum into a nightmarish labyrinth, as mad and mixed up as something from the drawings of Escher or the mind of Kafka.