Kerrand creates the final volume of his comic series in Sokcho

Yan Kerrand creates the final volume of his comic series in Sokcho by bringing the town and its surroundings into an established world of wordless, monochrome travel. The work’s movement from familiar ink drawings toward images that blur, open out, and finally fade makes the act of creation part of the story: Kerrand is trying to finish the series even as he fears losing control of it, and the pages left behind suggest a work still changing rather than a neatly completed book.

The final volume and its setting

Kerrand’s project is the tenth and final installment of his best-known series, which is due to appear the following year. The earlier books follow a globe-trotting archaeologist, with each volume taking the lone hero to a different location. The series relies on monochrome ink wash and uses very few words, sometimes none. Its recurring figure is conspicuously larger or more clearly rendered than the people around him: in some scenes he looms over shadow-like figures, while in others only his features emerge and the surrounding world is obscured by the detail of a chair, stone, or leaf. That established visual language gives the last volume a formal inheritance, but also leaves Kerrand uncertain about how to develop it.

Sokcho enters the work gradually. When the narrator asks whether the last book will be set there, Kerrand recalls that the same question was put to him two weeks earlier, when he had not yet decided. He has travelled to most of the places represented in the earlier books, but has never been to Korea before. In his emerging drawings, the hero arrives in a town whose hotels the narrator recognizes as local. A frontier appears as a scribble of barbed wire, and a cave with Buddhas also passes from the narrator’s surroundings into the comic. These are not merely generalized stops on the archaeologist’s travels: recognizable places from Kerrand’s new environment have been planted in his fictional one.

Drawing, light, and the page

The narrator sees that Kerrand can draw the hero with the ease of someone who knows the strokes by heart, manipulating the forms almost with his eyes closed. Yet that assurance does not mean the images are settled. Some drawings are in pencil and others in ink; the sequence of the hero’s arrival, the frontier, and the cave already establishes a visual route through Sokcho, while the pages remain works in progress.

Kerrand rejects colour when the narrator asks why he does not use it. To her, Sokcho is vividly colourful; to him, colour is unnecessary. He points instead to a snowy mountaintop under a high sun, rendered with only a few lines defining the rocks and most of the page left blank. The exchange turns a disagreement about technique into a difference in how the landscape is perceived. The narrator initially sees a spare drawing; looking again, she attends to the white paper between the lines, where the snow seems to emerge through light rather than ink. The page’s emptiness is doing representational work.

That shift in perception extends to the panels themselves. Their frames seem to distort and blur, as if the hero is struggling to escape their limits, and time appears to expand across the sequence. Kerrand describes the point at which he can release a story as the moment when its character has acquired a life of his own. The idea links the comic’s formal looseness to the problem of authorship: a character’s apparent independence can be the sign of successful creation, but it also marks the artist’s diminishing command over what he has made.

A story that resists completion

By the time the narrator asks about the hero, Kerrand has produced sketches but nothing final. He says that the previous books followed one another naturally, whereas he cannot decide how this last one should develop. His uncertainty is bound up with the ending itself. He fears losing the world once the book is finished and no longer being able to control it. The narrator asks whether he trusts his readers, but that is not the issue he is trying to describe: the difficulty lies in the story’s movement away from its maker.

Kerrand explains that one story continues to draw itself even as he begins imagining another, and that he nevertheless has to finish the work already in progress. Each new project would restart the same cycle. His problem is therefore not a lack of images or of a practiced hand; it is the gap between what he wants to convey and what the evolving work will allow him to say. The final volume’s status as the series’ last book intensifies that impasse. It must bring an established sequence to a close, yet Kerrand cannot find a settled development for it and fears the loss that closure entails.

The pages left behind

Kerrand eventually tells the narrator that he has decided to return to France and will leave in four days. The sketches she later sees in his sketchbook offer a glimpse of the work’s visual destination, but do not establish that the final volume has been completed or published. Its images continue to behave like an unfolding process rather than a closed narrative.

The hero and an old-looking, one-legged heron stand together on a winter shore, gazing at the sea beneath a snow-covered mountain. The enlarged frames contain no words. Water spurts from the bird’s beak and becomes a river flowing into the ocean, turning a small image into an expansive movement across the page. Later, faceless, ageless walkers leave faint traces of yellow and blue in wet sand. The sea extends beyond the beach and into the sky; outlines disappear until the edges of the page alone contain a place that is simultaneously taking shape and dissolving. The sequence makes transition visible: snow and sea spray meet, while snowflakes either evaporate or join the water.

In further pages, the image recedes into blue ink. The heron’s eyes are closed; the man moves passively beneath the waves, with the traces of a woman’s body appearing behind him and tapering into a fine line on a thigh. This return of bodily imagery complicates the preceding movement from landscape toward abstraction: the world of the comic does not simply open into freedom from its frames but carries images onward in altered form. Left in the sketchbook after Kerrand’s departure, the sequence preserves the final volume as an unfinished passage between control and release, between the places he has drawn and the images that seem to draw themselves.