This amnesiac man, who had once worked with Marie Curie at the Radium Institute, could be the key to leading the resistance against the takeover of Europe by Doctor Mabuse and his allies, Gog in Italy, the Phalange in Spain and the troubled "Nous Autres" in the East.

[1] With this in mind, in the late 1990s, Serge Lehman drew up a project for an uchronistic novel dedicated to the city of Metropolis, in which he planned to depict the French supermen of the 1920s and 1930s and retrace their disappearance from the collective imagination.

[5] Indeed, unlike in the USA, where the genre remains fertile and capable of regular renewal, in France, stories about supermen disappeared in the aftermath of the Second World War, also obscuring all the French anticipation of the interwar period.

[12] This rediscovery is also accompanied by a reappropriation of this heritage by French authors interested in certain figures from the popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,[13] not least thanks to the fact that the stories of many heroes are beginning to fall into the public domain.

In this respect, the work of publisher Jean-Marc Lofficier within the Rivière Blanche collection has made it possible to feature many famous or forgotten heroes of popular literature in the short story anthologies Les Compagnons de l'Ombre.

[15] In addition to literature, comics are also a very dynamic medium for the recognition of the scientific marvelous;[16] in fact, since the beginning of the 21st century, the super-heroic theme has been tackled more and more, and in a more complex way, by various authors,[17] such as the series Les Sentinelles by Xavier Dorison and Enrique Breccia, published three months before the release of La Brigade chimérique.

[14] This renewed interest also seems to be part of the wider steampunk movement, an uchronistic literary genre that emerged in the 1990s, revisiting a past – initially that of the 19th century – in which technological progress has accelerated and crystallized.

[20] Serge Lehman pays explicit homage to the novel with a cameo by the de Givreuse twins, depicted in conversation with the Atlantean Sun-Koh, the hero of German writer Paul Alfred Müller.

[23] He reveals that this 1919 novel, published by Louis Querelle, tells the story of Captain Jean Brun de Séverac, who disappeared in the trench warfare of the First World War, reappearing in the form of four characters: a teenager, a bearded, hairy giant, a skeletally thin bald man and a young woman.

Information on the novelist's very sketchy biographical details comes from the website of the "Société des amis de George Spad", to which the essayists Joseph Altairac and Guy Costes seem to be close.

[28] The authors also endeavored to respect the geopolitical chronology of interwar Europe: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Weimar Republic, the Spanish Civil War, while reinterpreting these events through a conflictual prism of superhero and supervillain.

[30] Created in 1921 by novelist Norbert Jacques, Dr. Mabuse is a German criminal and archetypal "evil genius", like his contemporaries Fu Manchu and Fantômas, whose mastery of telepathic hypnosis enables him to enslave his victims.

When the gas cleared, his men discovered four individuals amid the rubble of his laboratory: a teenager, a giant with a beard and hair, a young woman resembling Patricia Owens and a bald, skeletally thin man,[2] who became entities with marvelous powers when the series was completed: the Unknown Soldier has angel wings and a great sword of flame; the Brown Baron is a humanoid bear of extraordinary strength; Patricia commands life forms; and Doctor Serum is a skeleton with a deadly touch.

For fifteen years, the Chimeric Brigade travels the world fighting villains in adventures with recurring foe Dr. Mabuse,[41] at the end of which Marie Curie manages to reverse the quadripartition and awaken an amnesiac Jean Séverac.

[8] This Gang M, made up of a cold scientist, a female vampire and a "man-animal", is the equivalent of the Brigade's chimeric entities: Doctor Serum, Matricia and Baron Brun,[31] who are missing a member: the Unknown Soldier, who represents the moral figure.

[22] Indeed, not only is George Spad presented as a feminist, an anarchist and, like her model Renée Dunan, close to André Breton and the early Surrealists, she also claims to be the author of Baal, une aventure de Palmyre.

The authors use her fate as a metaphor for the demise of European fantasy literature, since after being arrested by the Germans and deported to the Auschwitz camp, she dies in the gas chambers, science definitively winning out over superscience.

That's why Belgian writer Jean Ray's hero Harry Dickson finds himself chatting with British writer William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, while the twins in J.- H. Rosny's twins converse with German Paul Alfred Müller's Atlantean Sun-Koh; Paul Féval Jr.'s Félifax, a member of Jean de La Hire's CID organization, is sent to investigate Fritz Lang's Metropolis; and heroes like Marcel Aymé's François Dutilleul and Jacques Spitz's Dr. Flohr, the scientist behind L'Homme élastique, frequent Marie Curie's Radium Institute.

In Paris, the lonely Nyctalope sinks into bitterness and madness, while in Metropolis, Gang M, realizing that superscience is waning before it dies out, sets about merging to reform the "Man of Comines" aka Adolf Hitler.

First of all, supermen and proto-superheroes, which were a very important element of interwar European science fiction, were largely forgotten after the Second World War, as the concept was used extensively by the Nazi regime through the figure of the pure white superman.

[31] By constantly blending fiction and politics, the series bears witness to Europe's failure to overcome its self-destructive tendencies, in the face of a United States where hope was shifting on the eve of the Second World War.

This man of clay, fashioned by Rabbi Loew, not only evokes the Jewish people made undesirable in Europe, but, as the last survivor of the European Magic Age,[38] he is also the source of the superscientific powers that sustain the story's marvellous dimension; his departure therefore brings the uchronic parenthesis of history to an end.

The graphic work of illustrator Stéphane Gess and colorist Céline Bessoneau is in keeping with the tradition of popular literature, insofar as the authors aim to restore to their former glory European characters who have fallen into oblivion, unlike their American counterparts.

[56] The atmosphere recreated in the series adopts a retro, steampunk tone which, while it harks back to the pioneering science fiction of Jules Verne, is fully marked by the influence of the feuilletonistes and their taste for commercial excess, like the fantasies of a Gustave Le Rouge.

[56] In addition, to immerse readers as fully as possible in the story's literary imagination, the authors reproduced in the margin notes a number of covers from period series whose fictional characters or their writers appear in The Chimera Brigade, such as Belzébuth by Jean de La Hire, Le Réveil d'Atlantide by Paul Féval fils and H.-J.

[57] In addition to the format, the series adopts the narrative codes of American comic books, i.e. a steady pace with twists and turns at the end of each episode, while instilling a European touch through the settings, characters and, above all, a European-centric plot.

[48] Although the resemblance of La Brigade chimérique to its elder sibling, Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is regularly evoked, the comparison is systematically seen as inappropriate by critics, given the extent to which the two works differ, whether in terms of their intended purpose or the method employed.

[4][54] In this respect, the aim of the series initiated by Serge Lehman to not only create a common genealogy with American superheroic mythology, but also to rethink historical events through the prism of the European imagination of the 1920s and 1930s, is deemed to have been successful.

[4][52][61] While Gess's line may appear old-fashioned and outdated to the reader at first glance, his graphic work succeeds in reviving the retro style of the 1920s–1930s, which ultimately gives the saga a strong visual identity,[64] as in the flashback scenes, accomplished with colorist Céline Bessonneau, which he introduces with great creativity.

[39] Finally, Serge Lehman reunites with illustrator Stéphane de Caneva and colorist Lou – with whom he had collaborated on Metropolis – to publish a sequel in January 2022 entitled The Chimera Brigade – Ultimate Renaissance, set after Masqué.