SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
SLJ Blog Network +
  • 100 Scope Notes
  • A Fuse #8 Production
  • Good Comics for Kids
  • Heavy Medal: A Mock Newbery Blog
  • Teen Librarian Toolbox
  • The Classroom Bookshelf
  • The Yarn
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • About/Contact
  • Previews
  • Reviews
  • Manga
  • All Ages
  • Young Adult
  • Interviews
  • News

August 3, 2017 by J. Caleb Mozzocco

Review: ‘Ten Thousand Years in Hell’

August 3, 2017 by J. Caleb Mozzocco   Leave a Comment

10000Years-in-Hell-COVER header

Ten Thousand Years in Hell
Writer/Artist: Maurice Tillieux
Fantagraphics; $19.99

The title story in Ten Thousand Years in Hell, a new collection of a pair of Gil Jordan, Private Detective stories from the early 1960s, takes its title from a courtroom scene. Jordan and his comic relief sidekick Crackerjack are before a tribunal in a fictional South American dictatorship and they are about to be sentenced to a notorious labor camp. Crackerjack, still suffering the effects of the laughing gas he was accidentally exposed to—a canister of the stuff got mixed in with the tear gas they pair are being bombarded with on the cover—he inadvertently gets into a bidding war over his sentence with the judge, transforming their initial ten-year sentence into a 10,000-year one.

10000Years-in-Hell-COVERThey don’t stay that long, however, and in fact are able to escape in a matter of days. Despite the maybe bleak-sounding title, Ten Thousand Years in Hell is really an all-ages comic, similar in its mix of action, adventure and humor to other, more widely-known European comics of the era, like Tintin and Asterisk, or, here in the states, Carl Barks’ Disney duck comics. Anything that a concerned parent or a librarian might flag as potentially inappropriate for the youngest readers is mostly due to cultural changes over the last 50 years: Crackerjack gets drunk at one point, there’s a lot of cigarette smoking and there’s at least one background gag involving ethnicity (As a crowd gathers around the scene of a car crash, one bystander sniffs, “They were drunk as Poles!”, while the man next to him replies angrily, “My name’s Sfrkvsrscky! Say that again!”).

SCROLL TO KEEP READING THIS POST

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

It is therefore a little more mature than, say, The Smurfs, which were born of the same magazine that Gil Jordan was and which the highly-animated artwork might recall at certain points, but it remains just as appropriate for (almost) all readers of all ages in this decade as it would have for all readers of all ages in the 1960s.

Gil and Crackerjack are a pretty classic comic duo, with the handsome former playing the sometimes slightly irritated straight man and motivating most of the action…as well as fighting any fights that need fought and coming up with any plans that need come up with. Crackerjack, his assistant, is there for laughs and little else, being a round little collection of vices—cowardice, gluttony, bad joke-telling—that propels most of the humor.

In the title story, they are approached by the brother of a scientist who has developed a kind of super-gun based on sonics. He has been kidnapped and brought to The Republic of Massacara, a tiny military dictatorship that covers a bunch of hostile forms of terrain: Mountains, desert, and a supposedly headhunter-filled jungle. Gil and Crackerjack’s investigation is stymied immediately upon their arrival, when they are arrested and sent to the prison camp, but that turns out to be a break, as the scientist they are searching for is also being held in the camp. They make a daring, exhausting escape through all of that harsh terrain.

That’s followed by another adventure, “Boom or Bust,” for which they don’t even need to leave the continent. A mis-delivered letter gets them involved in what has to be one of the most elaborate bank robbery schemes ever conceived, one that involves seemingly unrelated moving parts as a rash of van thefts throughout Paris, secret explosives testing near a completely deserted town in the countryside and an attempt to scare an old soldier from his family estate via threatening letters and the actualization of a legend involving a spectral black hound.

Given Tillieux’s masterful cartooning and complicated but zippy plotting, the book turns out to be more like an hour in comics heaven than 10,000 years in hell, but granted the latter is certainly a more evocative title.

Filed under: All Ages, Graphic Novels, Reviews

SHARE:

Read or Leave Comments
FantagraphicsGil JordanMaurice TillieuxTen Thousand Years in Hell

About J. Caleb Mozzocco

J. Caleb Mozzocco is a way-too-busy freelance writer who has written about comics for online and print venues for a rather long time now. He currently contributes to Comic Book Resources' Robot 6 blog and ComicsAlliance, and maintains his own daily-ish blog at EveryDayIsLikeWednesday.blogspot.com. He lives in northeast Ohio, where he works as a circulation clerk at a public library by day.

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Posts

June 2022

Review | Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

March 2022

DC Super Hero Girls: At Metropolis High | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

March 2022

DC Super Hero Girls: Spaced Out | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

March 2022

Unicorn Playlist | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

February 2022

Mickey All-Stars | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

ADVERTISEMENT

SLJ Blog Network

100 Scope Notes

Notes on June 2022

by Travis Jonker

A Fuse #8 Production

Review of the Day: Listen to the Language of the Trees by Tera Kelley, ill. Marie Hermansson

by Betsy Bird

Good Comics for Kids

Banana Fox and The Gummy Monster Mess | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

Heavy Medal

Mock Newbery Update – Our List of First Half Suggestions

by Steven Engelfried

Teen Librarian Toolbox

by

The Classroom Bookshelf

by

The Yarn

Shark Week, Vanilla Ice Cream, and the Honda CRV: Bob Shea and Brian Won Team Up for ADURABLE

by Travis Jonker

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Articles on SLJ

Six Manga About People with Disabilities

Shoujo Manga Is Back: 8 New Comics Made for Girls

A Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Book Challenge | Most Popular Posts on SLJ

LibraryPass’s Comics Plus | Reference Database Review

Exclusive Excerpt of "The Baby-Sitters Club" Graphic Novel 'Jessi's Secret Language'

Commenting for all posts is disabled after 30 days.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Follow This Blog

Enter your email address below to receive notifications of new blog posts by email.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News & Features
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • School Libraries
  • Public Libraries
  • Age Level
  • Ideas
  • Blogs
  • Classroom
  • Diversity
  • People
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Book Lists
  • Best Books
  • Media
  • Reference
  • Series Made Simple
  • Tech
  • Review for SLJ
  • Review Submissions

SLJ Blog Network

  • 100 Scope Notes
  • A Fuse #8 Production
  • Good Comics for Kids
  • Heavy Medal
  • Neverending Search
  • Teen Librarian Toolbox
  • The Classroom Bookshelf
  • The Yarn

Resources

  • 2022 Youth Media Awards
  • The Newbery at 100: SLJ Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the Award
  • Special Report | School Libraries 2021
  • Summer Reading 2021
  • Series Made Simple Spring 2021
  • SLJ Diverse Books Survey
  • Summer Programming Survey
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies
  • School Librarian of the Year
  • Mathical Book Prize Collection Development Awards
  • Librarian/Teacher Collaboration Award

Events & PD

  • In-Person Events
  • Online Courses
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Content Submissions
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Diversity Policy
  • Careers at MSI


COPYRIGHT © 2022


COPYRIGHT © 2022