shewhomust | Comics about the Ancient World (Reply)

The Graphic Novels Group has been considering comics about the Ancient World (whatever that may be). There's no practical way of getting hold of anything in multiple copies, so rather than all read the same thing, we try to find a theme which lets us bring together our scattered reading, and the current theme is that of the - entirely undefined - Ancient World. For the record, then:

We started with a prolonged wander through the deeds of Asterix. This is entirely on topic, of course, but we didn't talk much about their depiction of Rome and the Romans, nor of the unsubdued Gauls of that one little village, except to the extent that we talked about the 'Asterix and the Other Nation' pattern which recurs through the series. Mostly we just enjoyed the jokes, and talked about the merits of reading the original text versus the brilliance of the English translation, about Goscinny and Uderzo and of whether the series should have survived them.

When the word come round that we were ready to move beyond that one little village on the fringes of empire, I thought about what I might be able to read ahead of the meeting, and remembered the episode of Sandman about the emperor Augustus (because somewhere in Sandman you will find something of relevance to any theme). Better still, when I tracked it down to Fables and Reflections, I realised that the same volume also contains The Song of Orpheus. Two takes on the ancient world for the price of one: one a possibly fictional anecdote but given a firmly historical setting, and recounting a single day in which not much happens; one mythical, a tale of life and death, gods and satyrs, stepping outside time to talk of the Endless themselves. There's another kind of symmetry, too, in that both stories are drawn by Bryan Talbot, working with two different inkers. Can you distinguish Talbot inked by Stan Woch from Talbot inked by Mark Buckingham? Sort of - almost - I think I might eventually learn to do that. So that was very satisfying.

I came away from the meeting with something I'd never heard of, Three, by Kieron Gillen. The interior artwork by Ryan Kelly and Jordie Bellaire is fine, and the covers are better than fine (they reminded me of Charles Keeping, which is nothing to complain about) but it is very much Kieron Gillen's baby. The story of three helots in flight from Sparta offers a riposte to Frank Miller and the heroic view of Sparta and its warrior ideal, all meticulously researched. In the back matter (for Kieron Gillen is all about the back matter) there's academic discussion of how much this view is supported by the evidence (short version, there is evidence for this view, but it is not the only interpretation). Entertaining AND educational, what more could you ask?

In the discussion about the territories of the 'Ancient World', someone mentioned Egypt, which had not occurred to me. Through a miracle of filing, I was actually able to find my copy of Peter Milligan and Glyn Dillon's Egypt, and I have started rereading that - I hope to finish it on the train in to the group this evening. It's a return to the point of departure in the sense that, like 'Asterix', it is playing with ideas about ancient Egypt, its rituals and its gods, but with an altogether blacker palette. The protagonist manages to be cynical and unscrupulous to an extent which would be totally repellent if you stopped long enough to think about it, only you never get a chance to do that. Think of a slightly hapless John Constantine.

I wasn't very enthusiastic about this topic when it was suggested, but it's turning out to be a lot of fun.