Murena
Jean Dufaux and Philippe Delaby, 2001–

Premise
Claudius is dead, and Nero is Rome's new emperor. How will he rule? Will he be his own man or the pawn of his mother? And will the African slave of Claudius's son Brittanicus be able to avenge his young master's murder?

Evaluation and commentary
A while back I was in a comics shop and happened upon a volume called Swords of Rome, an English translation of a French bande dessinée called Murena. This was right up my alley: I like history — I actually just finished auditing an ancient history class last week — and the art was beautiful. Or at least, what was left of it was beautiful. See, the anglophone edition had been bowdlerized, the censors having crudely blurred the genitals of gladiators and statues, drawn bras over women's breasts, and otherwise reinforced every stereotype about American prudery. (Naturally, the disembowelings and such remained intact.) So I decided to knock some of the rust off my French and went to amazon.fr to order the original version, only to discover that while the US publisher had only released one volume before folding, in France the series was already up to volume five. I took a chance and got 'em all.

Now that I've read them, I'm glad I took the chance — I'll definitely be ordering future volumes (though I may wait and group them again to save money rather than busting out $18 shipping on each volume). I can't really testify about the prose style, since my French is not fluent, but the story is interesting and the art — especially the volumes with watercolor-like coloring by Dina Kathelyn — is just eye-poppingly good. I read an essay by Warren Ellis a few years ago decrying the manga influence that was creeping into American comics; his argument was that the whole point of the manga style was that it's fast, and the only reason to accept the loss of detail and realism is to gain the ability to crank out 100 pages a week, so if you're only doing 22 pages a month, you owe your audience more than a limited repertoire of standardized expressions on stylized, iconic faces in front of perfunctory backgrounds. Murena appears to represent the other extreme: only 96 pages a year, and much more effort per panel than in most American comics: distinguishable, attractively rendered, realistic faces with nuanced expressions, perfect anatomy and perspective, and such detailed backgrounds that you can linger over them pretty much indefinitely. I've never been able to get into manga, but I can easily see myself becoming a devotee of European comics if there are more titles like this. I'd welcome any recommendations. (I've also tried a series called Sillage, but it wasn't quite my thing — again, great art, but following the political interplay among all the different whimsical alien species was a bit much. Maybe I'll try again after my French improves. BONJOUR! JE M'APPELLE JEAN-LOUP. IL EST MIDI MOINS LE QUART. HELLO CROISSANT)


Return to the Calendar page!