ABC. is another comic released by Egmont in Agatha Christie's collection. And again we meet Hercule Poirot, who in this adaptation begins a death race with a mysterious and arrogant murderer.
ABC. is an Agatha Christie novel from 1936, which is one of her most famous crime novels. After reading it, we have nothing else to do but to sigh in admiration at the prophetic abilities of the famous author who, with the person of the mysterious A.B.C. she predicted the pop-culture popularity of narcissistic serial killers, although such a term has not yet been used in the novel or comic book. The murderer - who in choosing his victims is guided by the alphabetical order of their surnames and places where he kills - is referred to here as a madman, which somehow documents changes both in the way of valuation over the years and in the semantics pushed by the progress of civilization.
To accurately convey the plot of the novel, more than sixty pages of Francophone comic books were needed, very dense in dialogues and with a plot filled with various characters more or less related to the murderer's victims. The story begins with a letter received by Hercule Poirot, now retired. In the letter, the clearly arrogant sender challenges the detective, announcing that something terrible will happen on a specific day and in a specific town. Can Poirot prevent this? The three letters in the title indicate rather not, and we do indeed have more than one murder in the plot. And for a long time the famous detective together with the Scotland Yard policemen seem to be genuinely helpless in this game.
In the graphic layer, this time we have a bit of a cartoon line, which often twists the characters' physiognomies in a successful way emphasizing their emotions. It is known that in this series you should not expect graphic fireworks, because you need to focus more on the plot and the puzzle, but this time the setting really deserves a lot of praise. The cover, which seems to give us the image of the murderer, is particularly moving. He looks intriguing here and is not at all associated with a game master or a great manipulator who would lead the police and Hercule Poirot by the nose.
However, Agatha Christie's crime novels always bring many surprises, and it should be expected that the author will lead us by the nose more than once, inventing her multi-story intrigues, which usually strip away the aura of mystery in the finale, showing that the criminal (and not only him) is always guided by low instincts in life. In addition, we can once again see how much the modern writers of the genre owe to the mistress of crime, who generously use her heritage in building their own criminal intrigues.
In A.B.C. There is also a social sense of Agatha Christie, which manifests itself not only in relation to the hero visible on the cover, but also to these characters, often only overshadowed by great crimes. They are servants, shopkeepers, cleaners who have too gray a life to think about sublime crimes, and when it comes to them, they are able to selflessly help in the investigation. It is on the witnesses, on the right approach, that Hercule Poirot must rely on to discover some promising clue in the case of A.B.C. Although the characters in the comic mainly converse, the classically played scene of one of the murders remains in the reader's memory for a long time. Just like the cover character, who is the key to this story, which is much more than an ordinary detective story thanks to Agatha Christie's talent. Again, in this case, we can talk about the author's contemporary heritage, for example in the crime scene, where novels in this genre often comment on contemporary social problems in a better way than TV dailies and journalistic programs. The only thing that may be a little worrying about Agatha Christie's comic collection is the domination of Hercule Poirot's adventures. Maybe next time Egmont will give a chance to other, equally fascinating heroes created by the queen of crime fiction?
