The Sauroktones is a post-apocalyptic comic book published between 2018 and 2020 by French artist Erwann Surcouf.
In the near future, the Earth has become a very different place. An unknown disaster has upended our way of life: cars sit rusting where they stopped, cities have been reduced to no man's lands, and invertebrates have mutated into giant, deadly beasts. Faced with the threat of these roaming monsters, humanity's hopes lie with the Sauroktones, small bands of warriors who risk their lives to fight these creatures.
Amid it all, three youths are thrown together by circumstance, and will go to great lengths to stay united, help each other, and make their way through the strange, futuro-medieval landscape of a ravaged world.
The Sauroktones contains examples of:
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The mammals and birds are dying, but the insects and other strange creatures are having a field day. We come across a giant scorpion-scolopander and some enormous spiders, among other disproportionate horrors that crawl, swim or fly.
- Big Dam Plot: The end of the first volume takes place in a village floating on the artificial lake created by a huge dam. Things are about to get ugly.
- Born After the End: Zone, Urtsi and Ján, the three heroes are young people born a few generations after the End, this new world is theirs, and they no longer have any regard for the TheBeforetimes. Objects from the past are at best intriguing artefacts (such as a cracked smartphone), at worst pointless leftovers.
- Cargo Cult
- Chekhov's Volcano: Much of what happens in Volume 3 takes place in and around the crater of a volcano that is not completely extinct...
- Disaster Scavengers
- Fictional Media: Between each chapter of the story, we see covers of a periodical magazine called "Saurok Illustrated", telling the adventures of the main trio. It's apparently written and drawn in their own future by mysterious contributors, and stories are recounted hagiographically, with no hesitation in distorting reality to their advantage, making them out to be legendary and noble heroes. Things get more weird when a copy falls into their hands and they can read about their own future exploits.
- Picaresque: Their journey takes our three wanabe heroes to a mill inhabited by mutant ninja monks, a squalid tavern on a lock, a community of moonshiners who distil an infamous mushroom alcohol and organise gladiator fights, and so on. Each encounter is an opportunity to discover a new facet of this troubled world.
- Ruins of the Modern Age: A derelict factory used as a lair by an "ogre", an old underground military complex populated by blobs, a few wind turbines continue to turn but jam when giant hornets make their nests there, a fragile dam serves as a refuge for a community, a former cultural and arts centre now serves as a fortress for the local warlord...
- Scavenger World: As well as feeding on hunting, gathering and tins of food salvaged from under the rubble, the characters find a cracked but functional smartphone, an old road map, an authentic geiger counter that makes the voices of the dead ring out, a barely rusted hand-spinner...
- The Quest: The trio's big quest, which is the main arc of the 3 volumes, is to find the whereabouts of a mythical secret space rocket, and to board it in order to escape to the stars. Several side quests will be added along the way...
- Time Travel: At various points in their adventures, the trio occasionally come across a strange time traveller, leaping back in time to escape an even more catastrophic future. He makes it a rule not to tell them anything about the future, but only confuses things by clumsily trying to fix the past.
- Wasteland Warlord: We meet quite a few: a martial arts cult leader, the Lady of the dam, the guru of a group of terrorist pilgrims who want to sublimate themselves in space, a female warrior leader of a clan of male bodybuilders, a wheelchair-bound mutant who loves gladiators, and a bevy of looting warboys.
