Metadoggoz - by Berenice Motais de Narbonne (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A wise-cracking, dystopian visual feast

Gael Kaldera is a self-styled "junkyard dog" who runs with his crew the Metadoggoz: a squad of teenage dirtbags living in the techno-megalopolis, the Metastation. With no place to crash after losing his friend's guitar, he drops a tab of "metadoggo" at a late night rave with his friends and everything goes sideways. Strobing lights, teeming dance floors and endless skyscrapers form an eerie, futuristic backdrop for this daring, imaginative exploration of race, class, and belonging through the lens of youth culture and science-fiction.

In Metadoggoz, Franco-Vietnamese cartoonist Bérénice Motais de Narbonne constructs an uncomfortably familiar dystopia in which Gael and his friends slip in and out of our "real" world in search of something better. Each shepherded by a guiding spirit, they navigate the indignities of daily life: homelessness, mental illness, violence, and yearning.

Translated by Eisner Award winner Montana Kane, Metadoggoz reinvents the cyberpunk fairy tale in the vein of Tank Girl, Blade Runner, and Love & Rockets.

Review Quotes

"In a few pages, sometimes even panels, [Motais de Narbonne] takes you from a measured almost impersonal style to spectacular flights of fancy calling to mind the psychedelic delirium of the 1970s." --ActuaBD

"Bérénice Motais de Narbonne has created a debut graphic novel both as strange and as solid as only adolescence can be, a work both personal and political that evokes climate anxiety and a generation's resignation to a world mutating before its very eyes." --FranceCulture

About the Author

Bérénice Motais de Narbonne, aka B*MO, is a poet, comic artist, and animation filmmaker. They grew up in central France, known for its absolute emptiness, famous music festival and stories of witches, before moving to Paris to study literature and animation cinema. During their studies, they specialized in ceramics to create puppets and developed a feminist reflection on comics. Their graphic style blends 2000s manga, post-impressionist French engravings, psychedelic illustrations, and punk comics. Their art possesses a maximalist sensitivity, joyfully chaotic, stemming from their South Vietnamese family heritage.