Best of 2025: La Ville by Nicolas Presl
I realised that my current favourite release of 2025 is by an author who seems largely unknown in the English-speaking world.
La Ville (French for “The City”) is a wordless graphic novel I picked up while on holiday in France. I was fortunate to have it recommended to me in a French comics shop. I had never heard of Nicolas Presl, but the book looked interesting. Back home, I looked him up and found virtually no coverage in English-language spaces, despite him being quite prolific and his works being wordless and therefore universal. It feels like a major oversight! Based on the quality of La Ville, he deserves to be widely known.
Visually, Presl’s style here feels to me like a crazy mix of cubist Picasso and Charles Burns. It is stylised but always clear. In terms of the content, the story is a cross between George Romero and Michel Houellebecq. I read somewhere that zombies tap into a fear of the masses of the poor, the underclass and the alien. This comic takes that concept and relentlessly shambles forward with it. Each chapter reveals more of the world and repeatedly throws a spanner into the lives of the main characters. There is sex and violence, surprises and twists, with the whole story morphing from one thing into another - and the main characters actually undergo genuine changes. I loved it!
Actually getting hold of Presl’s books could be a challenge. Probably the best place to start is the website of Atrabile, his Francophone Swiss publisher: https://atrabile.org/catalogue/livres/la-ville/. There are generous previews of each book on there. His books have also been released in Poland, and since they are wordless, it shouldn’t matter which edition you get.
I have already got hold of his previous book - La Jungle - and am looking forward to reading it.