This little wordless story from Schuiten is pretty straightforward – a man on a train gropes a fellow passenger. What makes it interesting is the allegorical shift in the larger, train-based image, where the train seems to be morphing into some kind of gothic cathedral that is being erected from the material of the train itself. At the end of the story, the woman starts to cover herself up and the cathedral collapses back into being just a train.

It’s beautifully rendered, of course, with a kind of flat posterized coloring scheme that Schuiten seemed to be experimenting with during this period, before dropping it completely.

(Heavy Metal issue #81, December 1983 – Page 44 The Rail by Schuiten)