White Shadows
Writer: Antoine Ozanam
Artist: Antoine Carrion
Translator: Dan Christensen
Publisher: Magnetic Press
Publication Date: January 2026
Death strikes, betrayal discussed or has taken place, there is the growing sense that nothing is truly what it seems – and we are only a few pages into writer Antoine Ozanam and artist Antoine Carrion’s medieval fantasy tale of political intrigue.
In White Shadows, a prince is stolen by a strange being, and the king calls upon the heads of the kingdom’s leading families – each a rival to succeed the throne – to engage in the hunt to slay the ‘creature’ and return the prince. Everyone has an agenda, and over the course of the book you wonder what new surprise is around the corner, and who will live to see the final page.
Writer Antoine Ozanam, translated from the French by Dan Christensen, crafts an entertaining and tense plot that lures you in and is never truly predictable. What is written on the page – in captions or dialogue – is just enough to give you an idea of who each character is and their own personal motivations, as well as to build out the context of this world. We are given no more, nothing to fully give characters depth and three-dimensionality. They serve the story, it is left to the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.
Such heavily plot-focused narratives have become fairly uncommon nowadays, where you tend to have captions as an outlet for inner monologue, or we are led along by sympathetic viewpoint characters. Here everyone is a chess piece in a grand game, which might annoy those looking for someone to root for or care about, but gives ample room for a rather intelligent work full of ambiguity and mystery. Not so much a whodunnit but a ‘who-is-next’.
By far the biggest selling point for White Shadows is in the art department. Despite the book being among Antoine Carrion’s first professional comics works (L’Ombre blanche debuted in 2013 from Éditions Soleil) he had clearly already mastered the importance of dedicating as much – or more – energy into backgrounds and setting as on the characters themselves. Graveyards, snowy plains, silent battlefields – every page has a sense of place and evokes a sombre or ominous mood. Conversations feel rooted and every page is a wonder to behold.
The book isn’t without its flaws – despite Carrion’s mastery of backgrounds, there is an inconsistency in his character work. Some pages will have tight proportions and features, and on another page things loosen or the inks get a bit too heavy handed. It doesn’t happen often but it becomes most noticeable when we have close ups which feel a bit too loose. Thankfully that is only one or two pages. As for the story itself, there is betrayal on betrayal on betrayal, though some of the turnarounds are rather clever, some – particularly later in the book – veer too close to the ridiculous.
All that said, the true value is, and remains, the art of Antoine Carrion. The third English release featuring the artist’s (and writer Antoine Ozanam’s second) work from Magnetic Press after Temudjin (2022) and Nils: The Tree of Life (with writer Jérôme Hamon; 2020), it justifies the hardcover treatment and its place on the shelf for enthusiasts of good comic art, contemporary European comics, and those who like to see bad things happen to bad people.
White Shadows is out this month from Magnetic Press
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