The protagonist of the first volume is not a heroic leader. He is Proloff, a man from the tail who decides to walk to the front. His journey is not a revolution; it is a pilgrimage of pure, animal desperation. He crawls through fish tanks, sneaks through the drugged-out "Krol room," and witnesses the perverse cultures that have grown in the train’s isolated ecosystems.

The answer the book gives is a shrug. The engine must run. The children must be taken to feed the protein blocks. The "sacred" order of the cars must never be disturbed. When Proloff finally reaches the engine, he does not find a villain. He finds a system—a terrible, self-perpetuating logic that no single man can stop.

The journey of Le Transperceneige began in when it was first serialized in the magazine À Suivre . The first volume, L'Échappé (The Escape), introduced a stark, black-and-white world that felt radically different from the colorful adventure comics of the era.