Kudu are dying in southern Africa, and nobody understands why. They have been browsing acacias, as always. Except that the trees, over-browsed, concentrated the tannin in their foliage to a lethal level, and warned their neighbours through the air. The episode is real, dated around 1990, and it was Zep’s son, Arthur, who reported it to him. That is where The End opens, and the whole album follows on from that single piece of information: what if the mechanism, instead of staying local, became planetary.
Zep is Philippe Chappuis, and for most readers he is Titeuf. Here, with Rue de Sèvres, on 25 April 2018, he publishes a large-format book of about ninety pages. Reissued in January 2023.
Two threads that meet only too late
The narrative starts with two apparently unrelated stories.
First thread, the Spanish Pyrenees. A couple of hikers arrive in a village where all the inhabitants are already lying on the ground, unconscious or dead, then collapse in turn. No trace, no wound, no attacker. Nothing that looks like a cause.
Second thread, Sweden. Théodore Atem, a young biologist, joins a team based in a nature reserve. The team is led by Professor Richard Frawley, a palaeobotanist with a foul temper, surrounded by his assistant Moon and a researcher named Sorge. Their subject is communication between trees. They measure the gas exchanges in the reserve, and the signals gradually become unreadable, then frankly strange.
Frawley defends a thesis that his colleagues consider fanciful. Trees hold in their DNA the memory of the Earth, an archive he calls the codex arboris. The non-coding portions of their genome carry information far older than the appearance of the human species. Zep says he invented this element before discovering that these unread portions really do exist, which made the idea of a store of ancient undeciphered information at least conceivable.
While the team measures, the anomalies pile up, and they are well observed. Wildlife loses its fear of humans and lets itself be approached. Unknown fungi grow, both in the Swedish reserve and at the sites of the Spanish deaths. The trees start secreting unusual substances. A pharmaceutical firm quietly funds the work, which for a while raises the convenient suspicion of industrial responsibility.
The turning point comes from cross-referencing. By setting the genomes analysed in Sweden against the Spanish deaths, the animal behaviours and the fungi, Frawley understands, too late, that he is not looking at local accidents but at the first signs of a global phenomenon. The trees, saturated by human disturbance, communicate with each other and trigger a coordinated mutation. They change the composition of what they emit, and the human species becomes the target of a biological regulation, exactly like an animal population that has grown too large. Frawley pushes the hypothesis all the way: the Earth has done this before, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs came from the same mechanism.
Then humanity falls. Everywhere, without warning. Théodore and a few rare survivors are spared. None of the reviews I have read says what sets them apart, nor what exactly becomes of Frawley, Moon and Sorge.
An almost silent ending
The last part changes register, and that is what interested me most formally. It becomes almost silent, carried by landscapes rather than by dialogue, melancholy without being despairing. The question it leaves open is that of a new chance, of a survival begun again on other foundations. Several critics fault it for arriving too quickly and for lacking radicality given the tension built up over sixty pages. The criticism is not absurd.
The line, the colour, the large format
Here Zep leaves the cartoon behind for realistic drawing, and that is the unanimous observation of all the reviews. The line remains recognisable, but it serves proportioned characters, expressive faces, forests and animals handled with precision. He worked from models and photographs, having people close to him pose, his son serving as the reference for Théodore.
Colour is the other deliberate choice. The album works in very restricted ranges, sepia, duotones, each sequence given its own dominant tone. Zep explains that he uses it as a narrative rhythm. The effect is muted, cottony, frankly unsettling. Favourable readers speak of very gripping atmospheres, the others find the whole thing monotonous and consider that the sepia blunts the visual impact. The large format allows for big panels and wide shots, dialogue is rare, so the reading is quick despite the page count.
One reservation recurs across several reviewers, and it is fair: in a story whose main agent is the forest, it is the humans who occupy most of the drawn surface.
What Zep read before writing
Eighteen months of documentation, of reading and of meetings with researchers. The botanist Francis Hallé, creator of the Radeau des Cimes, is the one he cites first, and it is from him that Frawley gets his appearance and his stature. Zep makes clear that the resemblance stops there, the character’s dark temper and his passion for rock being pure fiction. On his method, he is blunt: “I wrote my synopsis and afterwards I consulted quite a few scientists to check whether what I was saying was plausible.”
What passes from the research into the story: chemical communication between trees, the underground networks that link them, the capacity for anticipation (he mentions Spanish cedars sensing the warning of a fire carried on the wind), the unread portions of the genome. The extrapolation, for its part, begins the moment a real and local chemical defence becomes a strategy coordinated on a global scale, endowed with intention and able to target a specific species. Zep accepts the register of the fable, and his intention fits into one sentence: “let us not forget that we are not the masters of the earth”. He adds that “we are here because we have forgotten nature”. The reversal is there, deliberate: in the ordinary ecological apocalypse, it is man who triggers the disaster, here it is nature that acts.
Morrison in the background, very loud
The title is that of the 1967 Doors song, close to twelve minutes, which closes their first record. Frawley plays it on a loop, at such a volume that his assistants have to wear headphones to protect themselves from it. The character takes shape in two moves through that single detail, the gruff old scientist, and behind him the former rebel. Zep points out the irony of that rock generation who were supposed to die young and who survived, the Rolling Stones being the proof. Morrison’s lyrics, which announce the end of everything and the end of the friend, run beneath the extinction under way. One reviewer notes that the music saturates the reading so much that other songs by the band, Riders on the Storm in particular, stay in your head once the album is closed.
A reception split in two
This is perhaps the most telling piece of data in the file. Planète BD gives the maximum score and speaks of a masterpiece. SambaBD scores it 9 out of 10 and praises science fiction without saucers or robots. Bubble 9e Art speaks of a shock of a read. On the other side, BD Gest shows an average of 2.82 out of 5, SensCritique hovers around 6.7 out of 10 across close to a thousand voters. The complaints are always the same: characters lacking depth, rushed ending, conventional ecological message, monotonous colouring. One columnist also notes that Zep took liberties with the real history of the kudu and the acacias. These scores and these judgements I take from the reviews, without having gone back to each source.
One thing to keep clear when closing the album: The End is a catastrophist fiction, not a document. What it puts forward about what trees do cannot be quoted as an argument, and Zep does not ask that it be. What I take from it, on the other hand, is what he says about narrative itself, that storytelling seeps into minds where statistics fail. I have been working for ten years to make plants heard in front of an audience, and I know he is right. The general public encountered the idea of plant communication through the graphic novel and the bestseller, not through peer-reviewed journals.
Read in March 2022. Entry written in 2026.
