By the time things get down to the level of the bande dessinée—I seem to want to say without condescension in that down—they are pretty well embedded in a culture. The Cold War—whatever it is, was in the realm of global politics—generated one ferocious French comic series whose indictment of human imbecility, affection for the downtrodden of the earth, contempt for pomposity, and remorseless scrutiny of failed idealism transcend that moment of grinding intersection between great powers to leave us a legacy viewable from the standpoint of immediate human history or eternal human comedy. The author/artist is Dimitri, an émigé who arrives in France armed with wit, talent, and a first hand knowledge of the machines and machinery of the Russian society of those years only to find, mutatis mutandis, the same idiocy, delusion, hypocrisy among his European hosts. He contrives, in a series of albums, up now to 13 or so, to set a lubricious if none-too-bright French engineer, Eugène Crampon (in Russia to supervise construction of a bridge but through misunderstanding and coincidence accused—that is, convicted—of espionage), into a labor camp in the Gulag. There he wanders the endless snows, kills the endless boredom in futile pastime, finds endless love with the nubile Lubianka, archsoviet-indoctrinated beauty, dodges the bulky, lunkheaded warders of the camp, enters the endless jousts with the irascible camp commander, Kamarad Kommandant Kalashnikov. The venue ranges wide, to include periodic escapes from the camp and displacements back into the world of dubious civilization, encounters with soviet bureaucracy and the Soviet Army, all before a background of lovingly (perhaps too-lovingly) drawn wastes (both natural and urban) and the machines of war (hot, not cold) while retrieved in a language rich in slang and a sort of hybrid, a pidgin of Russian and French: “Krampou, ya shkaniots za papiet dégueulasva?” (“Crampon, je te prends à faire des dessins scabreux?” subtitled, mercifully). The Gulag is a purgatory—ours, theirs—sunken in the endless crepuscular illumination of civilization’s last rays where the inventory of violence, despair, trauma, monotony gets recounted in a language of untoward elegance if profound vulgarity.