The Chimera Brigade is a French comic book series by scriptwriters Serge Lehman and Fabrice Colin, illustrator Gess and colorist Céline Bessonneau. The six-volume series was published by L'Atalante between August 2009 and October 2010.
The story takes place on the eve of the Second World War, in a Europe where superhumans are thriving, having appeared on the battlefields of the First World War, amidst gas and X-rays. Summoned by Doctor Mabuse to the heart of the Austrian Alps, they watch helplessly as his plans for European domination unfold. In France, while the Nyctalope, the new protector of Paris since the death of Marie Curie, abandons international politics, the Joliot-Curie, aware of the German danger, turn to Jean Séverac. This amnesiac man, who had once worked with Marie Curie at the Radium Institute, could be the key to leading the resistance against the takeover of Europe by Doctor Mabuse and his allies, Gog in Italy, the Phalange in Spain and the troubled "Nous Autres" in the East.
By revisiting the rise of Nazism, the series aims to use fantastic allegory to explain the disappearance of superheroes in Europe, and the fact that their very existence was obscured from collective memory in the aftermath of the war. While establishing a causal link between the end of European supermen and the emergence of American superheroes, the authors pay homage to the European anticipation of the interwar period, multiplying literary references to works that have fallen into oblivion.
Awarded the in 2011 in the "Comics" category, the series has been extended several times, with a role-playing game adaptation and comic book series set before the events , ) or long after (, ).
Development
Origins
The origins of the Chimera Brigade series lie in science-fiction author Serge Lehman's awareness, in the 1990s, of a paradoxical fact: science fiction is perceived as an essentially American genre, even though the genre existed and flourished in late 19th- and 20th-century Europe, and particularly in France. Yet this European science fiction, a literary genre featuring supermen, completely disappeared from the collective imagination after the Second World War.
With this in mind, in the late 1990s, Serge Lehman drew up a project for an uchronistic novel dedicated to the city of Metropolis, in which he planned to depict the French supermen of the 1920s and 1930s and retrace their disappearance from the collective imagination. But the sheer scale of the task prevented the project from coming to fruition.
The project was relaunched in 2005, when he took part in the launch of the Flambant Neuf comics collection by éditions L'Atalante. Lehman told the publisher of his wish to tell the story of the disappearance of European superheroes through a comic book series, and the publishing house then contacted Gess for the design. To bring his project to fruition, Serge Lehman enlisted the help of novelist Fabrice Colin to write the screenplay. The team also enlisted the services of colorist Céline Bessonneau, whose name appears on the cover and is indistinguishable from those of the scriptwriters and illustrator.
Through this series the authors set out to explain the disappearance of European superheroes from the collective memory, in favor of the over-exploitation of their cousins on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, unlike in the USA, where the genre remains fertile and capable of regular renewal, in France, stories about supermen disappeared in the aftermath of the Second World War, also obscuring all the French anticipation of the interwar period.
In explaining this disappearance, The Chimera Brigade reinvests the literary genre by featuring fictional characters who had their heyday in the early 20th century alongside historical figures from literary and scientific circles. In addition to paying homage to the French authors who pioneered modern science fiction by revitalizing their works, The Chimera Brigade also aims to make the genre more familiar to readers, so that French authors can take their turn in superhero stories.
The name of the series is a tribute to the Brigades du Tigre, the French mobile police force of the early 20th century popularized by the TV series of the same name, to the International Brigades and to the use of the word "chimera" regularly employed by pre-war authors.
To recapture the spirit of pre-war soap operas and comic books, Serge Lehman initially sought to publish the series on newsstands in the form of monthly issues. However, for commercial reasons, the publisher convinced him to adopt an intermediate formula: six hardcover albums, each containing two episodes, published over the space of a year.
Creative context Since the beginning of the 21st century the series has been part of a rediscovery of a whole part of the French-speaking literary heritage, not only of the scientific marvelous genre, but more broadly of the popular serial novel.
Serge Lehman contributed to this revival with his seminal article Les mondes perdus de l'anticipation française, published in Le Monde diplomatique in 1999, in which he lamented the neglect of turn-of-the-century French science fiction; then with his book Les Chasseurs de chimères, published in 2006, which brings together a large number of texts from the period, and goes on to reflect on the genre.
This rediscovery is also accompanied by a reappropriation of this heritage by French authors interested in certain figures from the popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not least thanks to the fact that the stories of many heroes are beginning to fall into the public domain. In this respect, the work of publisher Jean-Marc Lofficier within the Rivière Blanche collection has made it possible to feature many famous or forgotten heroes of popular literature in the short story anthologies Les Compagnons de l'Ombre. This in-depth work is as much a tribute as a contemporary reinterpretation.
In addition to literature, comics are also a medium for the recognition of the scientific marvelous; in fact, since the beginning of the 21st century, the super-heroic theme has been tackled more and more, and in a more complex way, by various authors, such as the series Les Sentinelles by Xavier Dorison and Enrique Breccia, published three months before the release of La Brigade chimérique. This series recounts the military adventures of mechanically-enhanced super-soldiers during the Great War, wounded by their sacrifice.
This renewed interest also seems to be part of the wider steampunk movement, an uchronistic literary genre that emerged in the 1990s, revisiting a past – initially that of the 19th century – in which technological progress has accelerated and crystallized.
When the first volume came out in 2009, comparisons were often made with Alan Moore's 1999 work The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which the English author recreated a universe in which numerous fictional heroes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries lived side by side. Indeed, to avoid being accused of plagiarism, Lehman is said to have delayed writing The Chimera Brigade. However, beyond the principle of reusing literary characters, the two works differ in their narrative objectives. While Alan Moore uses literary heroes in the face of purely fictional threats, Lehman uses literary characters in a teleological vision that aims to explain their disappearance from collective memory. To this end, he reworks all literary and historical characters to serve an original story, recounting the disappearance of European superheroes.
Between inspiration and literary hoax
In the appendix to the complete edition of La Brigade chimérique, devoted to the origins of the comic strip, Serge Lehman claims two major sources of inspiration: novelist J.-H. Rosny aîné's L'Énigme de Givreuse and mysterious novelist George Spad's L'Homme chimérique.
Both novels explore the experience of molecular separation. The first, L'Énigme de Givreuse, was published in 1916 and tells the story of Pierre de Givreuse, who finds himself split into two amnesiac entities. In his novel, Rosny addresses the question of memory and the consequences of amnesia. Serge Lehman pays explicit homage to the novel with a cameo by the de Givreuse twins, depicted in conversation with the Atlantean Sun-Koh, the hero of German writer Paul Alfred Müller.
The comic strip also makes explicit reference to the second novel, George Spad's L'Homme chimérique, both in the title and in the leading role of the character George Spad in the series. Serge Lehman refers extensively to this novelist in his note appended to the unabridged edition. He explains that George Spad – or George Spadd – was in fact a collective pseudonym used initially by Renée Dunan, then by a friend of hers from 1924 onwards, Huguette Blanche Perrier. He reveals that this 1919 novel, published by Louis Querelle, tells the story of Captain Jean Brun de Séverac, who disappeared in the trench warfare of the First World War, reappearing in the form of four characters: a teenager, a bearded, hairy giant, a skeletally thin bald man and a young woman. George Spad depicts the four heroes as each being an element of Séverac's personality. Lehman goes on to say that this novel was followed by a monthly serial entitled George Spadd's Pirates du Radium, published between September 1924 and February 1925. The series then ended with the announcement of a never-published adventure: The Chimeric Brigade vs. Dr. Mabuse. Lehman and Colin's The Chimera Brigade was a direct sequel to Pirates du Radium.
Information on the novelist's very sketchy biographical details comes from the website of the "Société des amis de George Spad", to which the essayists Joseph Altairac and Guy Costes seem to be close. In reality, however, this source of inspiration claimed by Serge Lehman, whose adventures fit in perfectly with the series' plot, is a literary hoax set up by the authors in the mid-2000s. In fact, during the preparatory work for La Brigade chimérique, Lehman wrote a text that was to serve as a preface to the comic strip, in which he presented the series as the continuation of a novelistic cycle from the 1920s. Although this preface was not retained, the character of George Spad was nonetheless included in the script as a heroine.a 4 Finally, in June 2021, novelist Christine Luce made the deception public, revealing her role and that of three other essayists and novelists (Philippe Ethuin, Joseph Altairac and Guy Costes) in the mystification. This revelation precedes the publication of the novel in September 2021 by Editions Moltinus. In a literary mise en abyme, Christine Luce wrote – under the name George Spad – the novel, which was eventually renamed Renée Dunan contre les mutants.
Setting
"Metaphorization" of history
By featuring imaginary vehicles and technologies, the world of The Chimera Brigade is described as "radiumpunk" by its creators. This word, derived from the term steampunk, highlights its relationship to the mastery of radium, whose discovery by Marie Curie serves as a temporary point of historical divergence. Thus, while steampunk, as its name suggests, is defined by its mastery of steam, radiumpunk is distinguished by its mastery of radioactivity.
The series is described as a "fantastic allegory" in that, although it is initially presented as an uchrony, it joins historical reality in 1939. Serge Lehman and Fabrice Colin set out to base the chronology of the story on real history, while incorporating all the issues they felt were linked to the theme of the superman, from Marie Curie's research on radium to Nazi rhetoric on the superman.