title: Den skandaløse billet
series: I hovedet på Sherlock Holmes
author: Cyril Lieron
artist: Benoit Dahan
published: 2019, 2021 and 2021, 2021
pages: 46 and 46
size: 240x321x9 x2
ISBN: 978-87-7085-867-0 and 978-87-7085-880-9

Subjective Sherlock

Is a human brain advanced enough to understand the human brain? Or even, can an inferior human brain understand a superior human brain? Like the brain of Sherlock Holmes...

You can have fun playing around with questions like these, but the author Cyril Lieron and artist Benoit Dahan took it a step further. They decided to make a comic on the premise, resulting in the double album "The Case of the Scandalous Ticket". It came out in 2019 and 2021. The series is called "Inside the Mind of Sherlock Holmes".

The task they set themselves was not only to understand the mind of Sherlock, but to communicate it to a broad number of readers. But how can one even approach that? Will the readers, after reading their story, be able to think like Sherlock themselves? Wouldnt they need to know every bit of memory he had? Sherlock had a private library, wouldnt at least it need to be included? How much would it be possible to extract and compress the knowledge of his library, in a form that a human can understand?

Some would say the task is impossible, and just wave their hands in place of an explanation. But Sherlock compressed his library to fit inside his mind. So it is not entirely impossible. But then take an inferior brain, it surely cannot reach the level of a superior brain. Well, a slow computer is able to run software written for a fast computer, so why shouldnt an inferior brain be able to run the "software" of a superior brain. It should be able to think like it, only slower, right?

At this point the know-it-alls will have noted that Sherlock is a fictional character, so it is meaningless to try to think like him. Those people can go watch their goldfish now. For the rest of us, Sherlock is a placeholder. He is the x variable for which we can substitute any real human that have a superior brain.

I could continue to pour out semi-philosophical questions about the mind. But before we get lost in speculation, we should get back to the point of interest here, namely how Lieron and Dahan went about it.

Narration

Lieron and Dahan opted for a whimsical approach. Every time Sherlock thinks about a puzzling problem, they show him going into an imagined building shaped like his own head. The rooms in the building conveniently presents as small panels showing a small Sherlock traversing them. It is a comic page inside the comic page. In the building he discovers parts of the solution in every new room. In the following frame in the normal comic page, the imagined building is gone, and Sherlock, who now has solved every piece of the puzzle, announces his solution to the amazed people around him.

This is a fun way to show a thought process, though without the shadow of realism. If we wanted to learn to think like Sherlock, we were cheated. What we got instead is a proposal to think about. How does their picture fail and what would an improved version look like? It can be a fun exercise if you are a little creative.

But for a start you should forget realism. It is a subjective story after all. You will get the most out of your first reading, if you play along with the whimsical style.

Another recurring technique is the use of small gimmicks. Some drawings must be seen in backlight, some should be seen half covered by another page, and so on. You probably know it from childrens books. It works well here. It breaks your routine, and changes your reading experience.

The book-gimmicks play on your nostalgia as well, to make you like the albums better. Its a bit sneaky, but also quite clever.

You could say that the narration is characterized by a long series of stunts. The fact that you see Sherlocks thoughts, is not a real attempt at showing a thought process, but just one of the stunts on the list. I dont know of any other comics, that do anything like this. It is quite unique.

The narration is one of the storys greatest strengths.

Drawings

As you can probably imagine, the special narration that is used, results in many disjointed page layouts. Chaotic at first sight, but (mostly) with a convoluted logic to them.

Dahans drawings are stylewise in a strange no-mans-land between book illustrations from around 1900, and anarchistic comics. That is at least how they seem to me.

I have not read any other comics by Dahan. Maybe he adopted this style for this particular comic. Maybe it is just the way he draws. If so, he made a good choice drawing this story.

The style is not for everyone, but it has some tangible benefits. One is that characters are caricatured. That makes them easier to remember and recognize. Another is that the style has a lot of flexibility, not limiting layout or image sequences.

Storyline

It is about solving a crime mystery. It is Sherlock Holmes, so it is what you expect.

The story has three parts, as I see it. For convenience I will call them A, B and C. The first part, part A, takes up all of the first volume. It is the puzzle solving part. Sherlock unravels the mystery, bit by bit, puzzly by puzzle. He is accompanied by a faithful Dr. Watson, actually doing a good job being useful. It is all fairly loyal to Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes.

Part A has been meticulously constructed. A lot of work must have gone into it. A lot of details needed to be fit together. It especially shows in the consistency there is in map clippings and chinese ideograms. It all becomes a little contrived now and then, but overall it works well. It is part A that is hands down my favourite.

Up to this point, everything I have written has been positive. That will change from here on.

Part B is the action part. The narrative style clearly changes. The small Sherlocks in imagined buildings fade out, while Sherlock and Watson in action fade in. This whole part is inspired by typical Hollywood movies, and formed by Hollywood sensibilities. If you think Im wrong and have the albums, try to reread part B, while you simultaneously imagine that Conan Doyle wrote it. Then you will understand.

Lieron and Dahan must have grown up with Hollywood movies, as so many others have. Consequently the movies have been deeply ingrained in their minds. Its just like the book gimmicks we touched on earlier. When making the story, the two intuitively felt that it ought to have an action part, so of course they added it.

Because Lieron and Dahan didnt have the limitations of constructing a set and hiring people, nothing prevented them from making the most pompous action scene you can imagine. Which they unfortunately did. In my opinion they lost everything right with that scene. What a shame.

I dont want to spoil anything, so I try to be very generic about the end of the story. Part C is where everything is wrapped up, explanations are given, and loose ends are tied. This part is in my eyes the weakest. It is still firmly rooted in Hollywood sensibilities. It is the shortest when counting pages, but it just drags on and on. It feels contrived and grafted on.

Conclusion

It starts out strongly, with freshness and originality. But it ends out as a moral lesson that is all but fresh and original.

Seen from a distance, the story looks like a metamorphosis. The old form rooted in the Sherlock Holmes universe, is ironically the form that is fresh and original. The post-metamorphosis form rooted in a Hollywood-inspired universe, comes across as petrified and formulaic.

...Case swept under the rug. Check. Condemnation of The Opium War. Check. Sherlock Holmes on drugs. Check. The end.

The Opium War was indeed condemnable, but literally in the following panel, Sherlock takes drugs. The adjoinment appears to be accidental. It is not followed by any interesting perspectivization. The two story elements are not used to make any meaningful point. They are only put there to check boxes.

I predict that those who will read the story decades from now, are going to find part A fine, but part B and C dated.

For future stories in the series, I hope Lieron and Dahan will believe in themselves enough to make them their way. Hopefully this, their first release, have given them enough self confidence that they will build on the energy they show in part A of "The Case of the Scandalous Ticket".