The art was lovely but the story was lacking. I lost interest when the tale of the young woman switched to the story of a tortured artist. ( )

The two introductions really over hyped this story: I was expecting an incredibly affecting, wild story that stuck with me, and instead got something that was... fine.

Mary, randomly, starts leaning one day, and is sent to boarding school when her parents are at their wit's end. Bullied and unhappy, Mary runs away and become the star attraction at a circus for five years. She meets up with a scientist (in the vein of Jules Verne) and discovers that she's leaning because her center of gravity has been aligned to a different planet/person.

Concurrently, there's a story told in (beautiful) photographs of an artist, drawn to an empty house and, eventually, to Mary. Mary and the artist are, of course, in love. And then he leaves her and she stops leaning and lives her life, always remembering him.

Beautiful and clear linework, but nothing too spectacular. ( )

After a freak accident, thirteen year-old Mary Von Rathen begins to lean at a 45 degree angle. After nothing fixes her affliction, her selfish mother and hen-pecked father send her away to a private school. Shortly after, Mary runs away and quite literally joins the circus where she remains for several years, performing her amazing leaning girl act. A newspaper editor tells her of a scientist, Axel Wappendorf, who is planning on a journey to a planet that might unlock the secret behind Mary’s trouble. Interspersed within Mary’s tale, is the story of fine artist Augustin Desombres, who escapes from his busy world and buys an empty building on the French countryside. He begins painting murals of strange globes and worries about his sanity. Mary’s and Wappendorf’s explorations bring them into a collision course with Desombres and hopefully the answers that Mary’s seeks.

Part of the legendary Obscure Cities sequence, this extraordinary French graphic novel serves as an ideal introduction to the long running series produced by writer Peeters and artist Schuiten. Expertly employing the tropes of 19th century science fiction, the duo’s creation achieves the unique duality of both very familiar and very different. Schuiten’s exquisite line work pairs perfectly with Peeters’ prose in creating the mythical worlds, outlandish ideas, and commonplace people. Further enhancing the work’s uniqueness is the Fumetti style of Desombres’ story as envisioned by the black & white photography of Plissart. The riveting, beautiful Leaning Girl fascinates, while providing one of the best reading experiences of the year. ( )

The rating above is for the story; the illustrations get 5 stars. ( )

François Schuiten returns to gloriously moody black-and-white hatchwork for this magnificent eighth volume of the Cités obscures series (depending on how you count them), which fleshes out some old characters and further explores the links between the Obscure world and our own. It's a real treat, with at its heart a beautiful, poetic exploration of being different – here exemplified by our young hero Mary von Rathen, who is tilted forty-five degrees into the diagonal.

Mary's story hits many of the familiar tropes of such narratives – she is shunned by her family, tyrannised at boarding-school, exploited by a travelling circus, prodded at by scientists – but in the skilful hands of Schuiten and Peeters nothing feels formulaic, and once again they seem to keep finding new metaphorical ways to tell us old truths. Mary's story is interwoven with two others – the efforts of famous Obscure scientist Axel Wappendorf (who has featured tangentially in several previous books) to establish the presence of a nearby but undiscovered ‘dark’ planet; and, most intriguingly, a subplot set in our own world, about a painter working in France's Aubrac plateau at the end of the nineteenth century.

Working out how these stories come together is a lot of fun, especially given the different ways Schuiten chooses to illustrate them. The real-world sections are presented in a sort of noirish photocomic style which makes use of black-and-white photography from collaborator Marie-Françoise Plissart – though, as we soon see, no one medium or story is truly isolated from any of the others.

This particular tale began life as a children's book, Mary la penchée, which is now included as an appendix to modern editions of volume five, La Route d'Armilia et autres légendes du monde obscur. It's quite fascinating to see how much deeper and richer that initial idea has become as the authors have fleshed it out into a full-sized album. This is the sort of book they could not have produced earlier – it shows a total confidence in their storytelling and in their universe which allows them to get unexpectedly ambitious. And for the first time reviewing these incredible books, I can have some hope that plenty of readers will be able to track it down, since this one exists in an English translation courtesy of publisher Alaxis Press, who are pledging to translate the whole lot and for some reason decided to start with volume eight.

Certainly it makes an appealing entry point, exploring as it does most of the main themes of the series (although the primary one – architecture – is notably absent here). For longer-term readers, this volume has all the usual sly references to earlier books and hints of things to come, and a metaphysics of how the Obscure world is related to our own now seems tantalisingly within reach. Schuiten's artwork is once again dream-inducingly dense and detailed; but while his settings continue to dwarf his characters, this time there is a very touching human story to balance the epic monumentalism of the draughtsmanship.

This is probably the best single volume since La fièvre d'Urbicande, and the associated mythology is only getting richer and more productive with every book. A wonderful piece of work, and one that you can't imagine could exist in any other medium. ( )