The next volume in the striking collection in co-publication with the Louvre Museum. An art assessor must evaluate the vast collections of the Louvre in an alternate Kafka-esque world where all is warehoused in an endless succession of basement levels. Mathieu, an artist who marries Escher with Kafka, brings stinging irony to the pompousness of art history. After Glacial Period, another stunning volume. Glacial Period has been nominated for an Eisner Award in 2007. (Comics' highest honor in the USA.)

"The second of a four-volume series copublished by NBM and the Louvre invites artists to create a story involving the museum. Mathieu's follows an expert hired to catalogue a vast, half-ruined museum; he encounters inhabitants living in the lower reaches who have no understanding of the location or its contents. A Kafkaesque catalogue of paradoxes ensues: paintings kept in the dark so the light will not damage the colors that no one will ever see; statues restored then broken then defaced to keep their states 'authentic'; a frame maker who considers his contribution the true definition of painting. As years go by, the expert becomes old and unkempt as further and further levels of absurdist cataloguing are discovered. Eventually, he discovers the deepest layers and the secret behind the Mona Lisa, even as he passes his journal on to another 'expert' for a continuation of these meaningless attempts to quantify art without perceiving its beauty. The story is rendered in grim, gray tones, which make the endless rounds of the museum workers look all the more fruitless. Like the expert, readers will be glad for the rays of real light and art at the end of this dark satire." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)