Peplum by Blutch review – a work of scratchy genius

Inspired by The Satyricon, French master Blutch’s tale of a mysterious Roman maiden has finally been translated

Last March, the New York Review Books began – hooray – publishing comics: new editions of what its editors regard as out-of-print masterpieces and translations of books that have hitherto been unavailable in English. Among the titles available so far are Agony by Mark Beyer, with an introduction by Colson Whitehead (classic tales of the dysfunctional couple, Amy and Jordan), and Peplum by the French cartoonist Blutch, translated and introduced by Edward Gauvin.

Peplum began its life in 1996 as a serial in the magazine A Suivre, when its author was 28. “I’d had enough of parodies,” said Blutch (real name: Christian Hincker) of it later. “[Of] the constant nods to this and that, the innuendo and authorial winks, all the mental crockery and referential baggage, the byzantine architecture of humour. I needed to do something pure, stripped down, fresher and more direct.” His inspiration was The Satyricon, a work of fiction by Petronius that exists today only in fragments. Peplum is not a sequel; rather, it’s an improvisation on some of its themes and tones. He also shifted the action from Nero’s Rome to the Second Triumvirate (as it opens, Julius Caesar is assassinated). Its title, meanwhile, refers to peplum films, the sword-and-sandal epics that were turned out by the Italian movie industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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