Quickly people are going out of their way to preserve what little of their lives they still have.

For the sailors or the title character there are industrial types who try to take over what they devote their lives towards. In this case it's about how newer ways take over some of the old. The jury, then, is still out, but this is an attractive read with which to dip your toes in the waters.Įsteban is one of those stories about coming of age after some traumatic event. The better thread to the rest of the story might be the hidden past of the skipper and his mother – but that might be straight from bodice-rippers, too. Future volumes would appear to have him communing with penguins, which ties in with his having had a message from an auk about his dead dad, but shows that some of this might just be a bit too fanciful. So on the one hand we have what seems a realistic evocation of whaling from five-man row-boats, in the stormy seas off the southern tip of the Americas, but on the other a whopping and sudden change in fortune for the kid. Reluctantly he's let on board, and lo and behold before the end he's being far too good at what he's supposed to be doing. When some cavalry marauder types wipe out his community, Esteban is left with just the one hope – he had been told by his mother before then that the captain of the 'Leviathan', a whaling ship, would see him right. Part one of five, in a slightly unlikely-seeming historical fiction graphic novel.

Le Baleinier by Matthieu Bonhomme