Set in 16th-century Netherlands, Raging Clouds follows a bold inventor shackled by the crushing weight of patriarchal control. Trapped in a marriage she despises, her basic freedoms restricted by society, Amélie must ponder her aeronautical mysteries in secret. When her husband arrives home with an exotic new slave, his suffocating erotic attentions are gladly diverted, leaving Amélie both to anguish over her place in their struggling household and to uncover the principles that lead to hot air travel.
Fantagraphics
Raging Clouds is a book about sexual, spiritual, intellectual, and bodily repression. For all that, the book has moments of almost transcendent lightness of being.
Though the book presents as a sort of erotically-charged lesbian period drama, promising a kind of freedom in love and lust, the truth is that the lightness of being comes from moments of intellectual epiphany – Amélie’s brief and too-few moments of scientific discovery, and the airborne experiments which result from them, provide our protagonist with her truest, freest moments. The sex of it all barely plays into the narrative (though it does exist); this is a story about learning, even if not entirely scientific.
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Amélie’s relationship with her husband’s tragic slave-mistress, Sahara, is one fraught with necessary tensions, but in time the two become the sort of friends made necessary by lonely desperation. That transformation between rivals to friends is a rough one – in one crushing scene, Amélie is confronted by the fact that she has spent months with the woman and never once asked her name – and while it never fully appears to reach its natural conclusion, it is with Sahara’s help that Amélie meets her true potential.
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Much of the book – airless as it sometimes feels – is held aloft in that light space by South Korean artist Yudori’s impeccable cartooning. It’s a deeply European Manga – the Netherlands of the 16th century feels as Western as the medium can stretch – but it retains the sort of wide-open, technically precise styles of its aesthetic forebears. Pages pass with sparse but brilliantly rendered esoterica, or with moments more narrated by facial expression than dialogue. Yudori is adept at expressing the inner light of her characters, and without that inner light Raging Clouds would be a much different – and lesser – creation.
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All of this is to say that Raging Clouds feels utterly unique, the work of a singular voice. Even as it plays into Manga conventions, it outpaces its peers to create something truly personal, charged with introspection and historical pressure. It moves in its movelessness, it soars in its repressions, and it excels past its stylistic restrictions.
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