…the black smoke from which soon cast him into darkness, closing his eyes and ears, leaving him with the disembodied hand of his nurse, Isa, and “the mystery of her hand in my hand.” There are the forest animals burnt to cinders on the first leg of his journey… The strange flame scorching through his nostrils in the second panel creates a nebulous map of memory which recurs fitfully throughout the comic. The protagonist’s distance from his lover is suggested by a hook of memory, plunged deep into his olfactory bulb (“…if I could somehow bring back, on a map, the smell of her skin.”) Instead we see Darko’s face superimposed over his former lover’s nares. The “atlas” described in the first panel is displaced to the second panel of the following page with its billowing continents. “Alice’s letter had been mailed from a faraway country…very far away indeed. The four panel sequence which relates this decision is a strange union of image and text, not merely illustrating but mystifying the process of description. Darko receives a letter from her some time later-”mailed from a faraway country”-not quite asking for him, yet somehow enticing him in its self-possession, inspiring him to set out on a extended journey in search for her By the time he regains his senses, she has already left him. The disruption occurs the moment she announces that she wants to have a child with him his seeming lack of commitment or existential terror announced by a flurry of pterosaur-like shadows and a roar in his ears. Over the course of three pages, the protagonist, Samuel Darko, recounts the circumstances under which he breaks from his partner, Alice. Lorenzo Mattotti and Jorge Zentner’s The Crackle of the Frost begins with a separation.

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