An oblique look at the Obscure Continent through its biggest newspaper, L'Echo des Cités, whose splenetic and vertically-challenged editor, Stanislaus Sainclair, we come to know quite well by the end of this collection. (To me he looks like Toulouse-Lautrec, but perhaps that's just a coincidence?)

As well as updates on the situation in Brüsel and brief appearances from familiar faces like Axel Wappendorf and Mary von Rathen (soon to take centre-stage in the following volume), there are also two overarching narratives that we follow through breaking news stories in different issues. One concerns the pilot of a Spitfire and his female companion who have somehow crossed over from our own world to the city of Alta-Plana, and want to get back; the other is about a pair of explorers who discover a set of enormous, ancient spheres underground, and somehow transport themselves thousands of miles away.

Originally considered a spin-off, this has now, since the remastered editions, been made a core volume of the series. The format makes it one of the less accessible entries, but it is quite a clever way to put a story together, and the way the authors keep stretching the world-building in different ways with every book continues to be mightily impressive.

Towards the end we also see the first experiments with integrating photography into the panels, something that is tried out more fully in later books and that is vigorously debated by some of the characters in here. When the Écho finally folds, its dwindling readership has been seduced by competitors who use front-page photographs instead of drawings, a practice Sainclair derides as being merely factual, instead of ‘true’.

The book as a whole certainly makes his case. The artwork here is as wonderful as ever, and so is the mood – that blend of esotericism and architectural melancholy that Schuiten and Peeters have made completely their own. ( )