'Peplum' by Blutch
The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece. Originally serialized in the French magazine À suivre in 1996, Peplum is now available in English thanks to publisher New York Review Books and translator Edward Gauvin. In his new introduction, the latter writes, “Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic—one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty.” Here is the plot of this beautiful graphic novel :
At the edge of the roman empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels. Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.
ABOUT BLUTCH
Blutch (Christian Hincker) is an award-winning, highly influential French cartoonist. He has published almost two dozen books since his 1988 comic debut in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide glacial, including Mitchum, Le petit Christian, and So Long, Silver Screen, his only previous book to be published in English. His illustrations appear in Les inrockuptibles, Libération, and The New Yorker.
ABOUT EDWARD GAUVIN
The translator of more than 150 graphic novels, Edward Gauvin has translated, among many other works, Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain's Quai d'Orsay (Weapons of Mass Destruction, Selfmade Hero, 2013), contributing to its success in the United States. He is a contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, and writes a regular column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review. Gauvin has received the John Dryden Translation prize twice and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Centre National du Livre, the American Literary Translators' Association, and the French Embassy. His work has been nominated for the French-American Foundation Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Best Translated Book Award.