Is every man killed in combat reborn in the sky in the form of a star?
Is seeing a bus in your dreams really a sign of impending death? In 1917, Jan Van Meer, an operative with the Allies’ intelligence services and a renowned expert on folklore, travels across Europe in search of an engineer named Hellequin, inventor of the dream cannon and barbed plant-wire now obsessed with reading the ruins of war. Van Meer’s mission: not to find Hellequin at all costs. With his trademark wit, original drawing style, and wild animation, David B. takes viewers deep into the torment of the Great War, where beliefs and superstitions inextricably mix with the horror of reality.
“Following an absurd dream logic, Reading the Ruins hardly keeps to a rational path, and David B. is as creative and imaginative as ever. His extraordinary detailed panels blend symbols with drawings that look like illustrations from medieval texts, blending folklore and mythology into the dark brutality and nightmarish quality of total war, finding a way to get beyond the surface to try and touch on the underlying insanity, and the insanity of seeking some kind of meaning or order within it.” The Digital Fix
