FOUND GRAPHIC NOVEL, OR COMIC

We had the gutters replaced recently - not your ordinary gutters, either: square-sided zinc-lined channels like small canals, running all the way round the house, out of sight behind the tops of the walls - and while the young man was up there on the roof, or, just as perilously, while he was exploring the dark mysteries of the long-neglected, floorboard-rotten upper floor of the barn, he found a French comic book from 1978. In a strikingly postmodern mix of genres, its story has cowboys and alien monsters: