2008 books
54) Jean Teulé, The Suicide Shop, 2007
This black comedy inevitably riffs on Delicatessen but it doesn't ultimately work the same way. In a future when the 21st century is just a distant memory the Tuvache family (a kind of French Addams Family) runs a shop for potential suicides in the City of Forgotten Religions, but from birth their youngest child is unnaturally optimistic and somehow turns around the family's obsession with death. There are several neat ideas that ought to work together though somehow don't, probably because they're not given room enough to be explored in much depth and instead end up as too many throwaway gags. This story would probably work better visually, as long as it kept with the book's rather curious form of joie de vivre.