Philippe Buchet (born 7 May 1962 in Juniville, Ardennes, France) is a French comic book artist. First working as a freelance illustrator in Paris and Reims, he finally entered comic book terrain with Nomad, on which he worked with Jean-David Morvan. He also worked for the magazine Dragon, and created Wake together with Morvan. While working for Dragon he collaborated with Morvan on a sword and sorcery series La Quete des reponses, which came out as a single album in 1998.
JEAN - DAVID MORVAN : THE WRITER
Jean-David Morvan (born November 28, 1969 in Reims, Marne, France) is a French comics author.
Jean-David Morvan studied arts at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels. Morvan first tried being a comics artist, but soon realised that his true strength is storytelling, and so now he is best known as a comics writer. He resides in Reims, France. His main series are Spirou et Fantasio, Sir Pyle and Merlin, all with Jose Luis Munuera, and Wake with Philippe Buchet.
THE STORY
The issues are published in a large format (19 cm by 25.4 cm) as soft cover graphic novels. Issues 1 through 3 were published individually. Issues 4/5 and 6/7 were published together as single books. NBM Publishing have stated that they will not be publishing the remainder of the series in English in the United States.
Wake is space opera, exploring social themes about inequalities, corruption and colonisation.
The protagonist of the series is Navee (Navis in the original French), a young human female who was shipwrecked and orphaned on an alien planet. She was raised from infancy by one of the ship’s robots, Nsob, and has never met another human being. The series uses Navee as an outside viewer of the Wake convoy as she adjusts to life in this alien civilisation.
The first volume of the series depicts the adolescent Navee topless. As a prerequisite for publication in the United States, the American publisher covered her breasts with a black felt marker in the American edition.
Navee is the only living example of humanity known to Wake. She is also unique in being neither a "psi active" nor a "psi passive"; that is, she has no telepathic abilities, but her mind cannot be read either. This lack of psionic talent of any sort comes in handy at times during the series.
Navee has white rectangular tattoos on her body. There is evidence to suggest she is not a true human being and these markings has something to do with it (Wake Vol 3;Navis Vol 2&4).
As the series begins, Navee has survived into adolescence and all the technology on her wrecked ship has finally failed. She lives a primitive life in the jungle of her world with her companion Houyo, a sentient tiger-like being.
Her idyllic life ends when agents of Wake, a traveling civilization of many different alien species, arrive to Hotta-form (equivalent of terraform) her planet for Hottard colonisation. Prior to encountering Navee, Wake had extremely limited contact with humanity.
After some first contact friction, Navee is awarded salvage rights to her wrecked spacecraft and joins Wake with enough money to pay for her education and to commission a custom spacecraft for her to live in.
When her money runs out, she goes to work for the Wake government as an agent and explorer within the Wake convoy and on technologically primitive worlds.
WAKE
The Wake Civilization is a vast convoy of spacecraft that constantly travel around the galaxy in search of resources, races, and technology. This convoy drops hypergates as it travels, allowing instantaneous access to previously visited star systems.
It is unclear whether Wake has any faster than light capability beyond the hypergates. The Wake civilization is very old. There are hints that it has circled the galaxy many times, and revisited many stellar systems over time periods sufficient to watch civilizations rise and fall. There is also evidence that Wake has terraformed planets and seeded life on them over a very long period of time.
As a synthesis of vast numbers of races with a long history, Wake is extremely advanced technologically. No two ships of Wake are designed the same, and some are clearly biological. Several ships and species are encountered in the convoy that are so different that communication is difficult or impossible, yet they are clearly a part of the civilization.
Artificial intelligences are used everywhere, but are considered second class citizens and kept under control by the biological citizens. Advanced biological information storage and processing technologies are seen several times throughout the series.
The communication technology of Wake relies heavily on psionics, produced and manipulated by both biological and technological means.
The citizens of Wake are classified by their ability to control the behavior of other beings through psionic powers and their susceptibility to control by the same means. This division of people into powerful and helpless categories is a consistent theme throughout the series.
The exclusive use of psionics for communication is hinted at as one of the possible reasons why Wake and humanity have never discovered each other, as Navis (and presumably all humans) are totally immune to psionic coercion and equally unable to manipulate or communicate with other beings through these means.
This ability makes Navis valuable as an intelligence agent of Wake’s military and use of this talent allows her to make a living.
Publish in Greece by the Comic magazine " 9 " by the newspaper " Eleftherotypia " in 1998 .
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