The pregnancy progresses rapidly and before you know it, she gives birth to a baby girl. No one theory stands out as more true than the others, and by the end nothing is confirmed.īut while the adults theorize, the kids–now teenagers–are left to their own devices, and now the first family’s daughter, Zoe, is pregnant. A sci-fi writer and his family show up, and a string of theories are presented ranging from an experiment where they’re the unwilling subjects, to hallucinating the whole thing, to even the possibility that this is all someone’s dream. The adults are also aging at an incredibly rapid speed–roughly one year for every half hour–with a grandmother being the first to die. The comic has European sensibilities towards nudity that I’m not fully used to as an uncultured American, but the boys are growing pubic hair and the girls are developing breasts. But while all attempts to escape fail, the two pairs of parents notice something even stranger: their children are no longer children, but have grown literally before their eyes. A racist doctor believes an Arab man named Kabyle is responsible, ignoring his claims that not only is he innocent, but there’s some kind of forcefield around the beach that prevents anyone from leaving. Several families all head to a remote beach for some fun in the sun, but the discovery of a drowned woman shatters the peace. It’s a depressing mystery that I found really engrossing! It also has connections to a movie, but we’ll get to that. Sandcastle is the work of French author Pierre Oscar Lévy, Swiss artist Frederik Peeters, and also credit to the English translator, Nora Mahony. Let’s try something a little different! Today I’m talking about a graphic novel instead of an individual comic issue.

Sandcastle by pierre oscar lévy