Grass-snake season

In a both familiar and yet very distant future, man has at his disposal a network of space doorways - chutes - which enables him to pass from one solar system to another, thereby dominating the Milky Way. The chutes were built well before the arrival of life on Earth by the Mohais, a race of engineers.

But something happened. A hostile intelligence split up the network and scattered its creators all along routes for which from then on no maps would exist. Reduced to a primitively tribal state, the Mohais became functionaries: their technical gestures were transformed into ritual. When man took control of the first strategic intersections, they did not put up any resistance. Today they assist in controlling interstellar traffic, all the while gradually relearning their history from what travellers in transit may tell them.

La saison de la Couloeuvre is the story of two young functionaries on Intersection 55, Rhea Davenham and Derec Finn, and a handful of Galactic travellers: Diane Bendix the starry Sentinel, Jarmil the ant-man diplomat, Xtalassar the armourer and many others. For thirty hours they are all faced with an unrelenting phenomenon that appears to be both a breakdown in the network and a return to a forgotten state of the divine. To escape the worst they have to go down into the depths of the Intersection, experience a world with different physical laws and confront a form of knowledge bordering on madness. But the stakes are high: the control of a hundred billion stars.

The Illustrator: 
Born in 1966, Jean-Marie Michaud spent his childhood in Corsica. When he was little he fell into the magic drawing cauldron and then onto graphic books he discovered through authors such as Derib, Hermann or Giraud. It was therefore a logical conclusion for him to study art (Arts Décoratifs de Paris). Alongside his work as an illustrator for youth editions, he is a collaborator on several series of graphic books with Claude Carré writing the scenario, with different editors: Le Pays Miroir, De Profundis… and with Erik Arnoux for La Dernière Fée du pays d'Arvor. At the Utopiales in Nantes he met Serge Lehman who immediately suggested he join him for La saison de la Couloeuvre, a mythology that matches the extravagance of their respective ambitions.