Night Animals by Brecht Evens

Night Animals Reviews

• 
  Drew Canole

  A really wonderful small volume by master cartoonist Brecht Evens from 2011. I was really excited to read this.
  
  At just 36 pages, you know its going to be a minor work going into it. There are two stories here.
  
  Blind Date
  The biggest story is a mysterious adventure which kind of reminds me of Winchluss's Pinocchio comic. A man dresses up in a bunny suit and sits on a park bench, night fall reveals a set of arrows which he follows across town, into a bar, down a toilet, through the sewers to the ocean, up a cliff side, etc... until finally finding a cute girl also dressed in a bunny suit. Super weird but so many beautiful pages rendered with lovely colors. Each new area has a different color code (blue ocean, green forest etc.)
  
  Bad Friends
  A coming of age story. Starts off as a B+W penned comic without panel borders about a girl getting her first period during school. Later she goes on a journey into the woods filled with odd beasts, the comic painted with just red tones.
• 
  Romane

  Superb, primitive, straight-forward, and dark. A book with two wordless stories. I appreciate the artwork so much, from the cover up to the contents. The first story (Blind Date) was very nice and disturbing, almost like in a dream with strange creatures lurking about. A tinge funny too, with that part about the rabbit's "hole." The second story (Bad Friends) is even lovelier. The message that it conveys is like the girl's coming of age, physically (the development of her body & having her period) and mentally (the whole illustrations about finding new friends and a new world). This book is haunting and very beautiful.
• 
  Emma Darcy

  Fantastically detailed artwork. The narrative of the story is communicated impeccably without words, however, the greatest strength for me is the endless nature of the fore and background artwork. I have read and reread it several times over and I am still finding new things I didn't notice before. Always something to see.
• 
  Alex Sarll

  Where The Wild Things Are, but make it sexy. Except draw it in a style that suggests the deep thickets of the subconscious, rather than being ostensibly sexy, so that it can be published by Top Shelf instead of ending up on the actual top shelf. In short, niche. Though undoubtedly a damn sight better than Dave Eggers' dreary slog of a Wild Things novel, and that one was official.
• 
  Moonglum

  There are two wordless stories in this graphic collection. Each creates a dream world of animal spirit monsters and tells the story of a human's journey in that world. The art is just amazing.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Eric Orchard

  Gorgeous and inspiring.
• 
  Inès

  Damn I wish I was visited by a demon wearing striped stockings who took me into the woods to party when I first got my period. Instead I only got cramps.
• 
  Rick Ray

  A slim little collection of two Brecht Evens comics, both wordless but featuring the delightfully painted and experimental artwork of one of the best cartoonists in the business. Collected in Night Animals is "Blind Date" and "Bad Friends", both solid short little comics.
  
  "Blind Date" features a man wearing a bunny suit going on an absurd journey that begins on a park bench and leads through the sewers into the ocean. Featuring an almost dreamlike tone, this one is a strong display of Evens' visual prowess and playfulness with respect to formalism.
  
  "Bad Friends" is another surreal dreamlike story about a girl experiencing her first menstruation that involves some truly spectacular visuals. Black & white artwork is used for the more grounded sequences, but as the story gets weirder, it also boasts some vibrant shades of red.
  
  Simple but effecting, and only something that the masterful hand of Brecht Evens can achieve. Worth checking out if you can find this in the wild.
• 
  NewNobodyAccount

  The book has two stories. The first is easy to understand. The second? You are getting it and then the end is a head scratcher. Like literally the very last panel explained nothing to me. Maybe it’s cos the second story is written by a dude, but the story is about a girl becoming a woman. Like I THINK I get it… I think it’s about her just being lost in her new world, but it’s hard to tell cos I don’t think most women react or feel this way about being a woman. Anyway, I’m over-explaining why I’m giving this a 4 instead of a 5 at this point but that’s why… cos the second one didn’t end in a way that made a lick of sense.
  
  Incredibleeeeee artwork, of course… goes without say.
• 
  Alexander Lisovsky

  Брехт Эвенс, автор моей любимой крышесносящей "
  Пантеры", выпустил в 2011-м году ещё один, на этот раз совсем небольшой комикс, практически без слов рассказывающий две мини-истории о сексуальных началах. Они изобретательны, прекрасно нарисованы и покрашены, и в целом довольно классные. Мало кто из комиксистов умеет и хочет затрагивать подобные темы, да ещё с нужным тактом и мастерством. Рекомендую, и вот небольшое
  превью.
• 
  RoRo

  This is a grotesque, creative, visually satisfying book. It is short but accomplishes many stories and messages. The creatures, the settings, and the narratives have that "weird but I can't look away" feeling. While reading it, my overwhelming feeling was that I wanted to see the incredible art on each page expanded to the size of a whole museum wall. Hopefully that happens someday.
• 
  Erin

  It’s like a dark and slightly disturbing acid trip you can’t look away from.
• 
  Sheikh Zabed Moyeen

  Mesmerizing! When art is more than enough, needs no caption. Though this is tiny, one can read it hundred times and finds something new each time.
• 
  Lee Klein

  Two pleasing, lush blends of Big Mouth and Where the Wild Things Are, for adults.
• 
  Renée

  I remember when ´reading´ the book it was a definite 4 star, with some pictures a definite 5, now for some reason it became a 3 afterwards..
  
  I recognise Brecht Even´s style from another graphic novel I read from him (and was lyrical about), with it´s many different patterns and details.
  
  The drawing was superb, there was great use of color and what I loved most of all was the viewpoints from which the story was told and the ways Evens conveyed movement. I was very impressed with especially two of them, one where the girl in the first story ran away from school and her face was drawn black and one could see the teacher and children far away and the other right after when she had just ran up the stairs. I could very much relate to that, because of the viewpoints and the little ways Evens conveyed emotions and speed (for instance the black face, the shoes flinging about, red stains etc). Also the growing process of the girl itself was very nice. Or to give another example, in the 2nd story one could see the car in the first pictures was driving because of the spinning wheels, a little gravel and smoke at the exhaust (uitlaat) and the horizontal lines under the wheels. Then in the next picture it stood still because you could see the rims (velgen), there were less stretched out lines under the wheels and no gravel. Those details make me tick. Love it.
  
  I was also impressed with the endless original and many ways Evens portrayed the strange animal figures page after page. It is just I grew a bit tired of them and felt an urge for a bit more ´story´ after the first couple of scenes in each of the 2 ´stories´. Also I found the magic in the magic realism character gone too far, maybe that is why I could only relate very well to the characters the first couple of scenes when things seemed more ´normal´, at least in comparison to the later scenes.
• 
  Daniel

  I enjoyed this mostly as a dark book of clever line art (well, there are no words, so that's the only way to enjoy it) but also for the coloration because it's so dense and eerie, but has a lot of depth. Took me all of 5-10 minutes to go through, and I feel it might be strangely haunting for awhile. Probably a good book to flip through each autumn, if only for the visual Bradbury-esque feel of it.
• 
  melissa

  This book has no words; however, the second story, about the girl getting her period, was lovely. I savored the drawings and fantastic creatures. The use of color was beautiful. It felt like a celebration of womanhood.
• 
  Michelle Hoogterp

  I like the rabbit portion. Very straight forward and interesting. The second one made me think a bit more and I really appreciated it.
• 
  Emily

  Just not for me. I didn't particularly care for the art and the story wasn't appealing.
• 
  Barbara

  Lovely art, cute and dark story. As Gene said: I want more!
• 
  Mollie Fabric

  One of my very favorite comics! Colorful and wild and free!
• 
  Kamakana

  Naive. Primitive. Simple ideas in simple graphic form
  
• 
  Ed Blake

  both stories are beautiful, but the second one is amazing and astounding and audicious and a whole bunch of other big important sounding good words.