A clever take on history turns a famed artist into a flawed and fascinating hero fighting for acceptance.
Mora’s graphic novel highlights the illicit romances and dramatic adventures of celebrated Baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio.
In Milan, 1591, Michelangelo Caravaggio has made a name for himself as both a skilled painter and a dangerous troublemaker. After seeing a dear friend burned at the stake for sodomy by the Inquisition, Caravaggio and his male lover Mario are desperate to flee the city (“Perhaps this is fate, telling me to leave Milan”). Impetuous and angry, Caravaggio begins slicing his way through the town to collect debts, making a dangerous enemy in Cavaliere Fabrizio along the way. After relocating to Rome, Caravaggio creates bewitching art that challenges perceptions of the church, but he also continues to find conflict in the streets. As Caravaggio’s temper draws more and more dangerous enemies, he and Mario must once again flee. They soon find themselves welcomed in Malta by a certain Fabrizio and his patron, Cavaliere di Giustizia. They pretend to love his art, but they are in fact the same men who tried to kill him in Milan years earlier, and they plan to use Caravaggio for their own political gain. With their take on Caravaggio, Mora and illustrator Mescaria subvert fusty ideas about classical painters, creating a queer, swashbuckling adventurer. Images of Caravaggio’s lithe, muscled figure against shadowy, gothic backdrops call to mind a fantasy hero more than a historical figure, while the story and exquisite artwork deliver one action-packed scene after another. The impact of Caravaggio’s art is addressed, especially in the Rome section, which works in some fascinating context about changing styles, but Mora is primarily focused on the doomed lovers and their cat-and-mouse game with various authorities. Some of the political intrigue and shifting motivations are a bit hard to follow, but those concerns are quickly swept aside as this unique and exciting version of Caravaggio repeatedly—and sometimes foolishly—charges into battle for the one he loves.
A clever take on history turns a famed artist into a flawed and fascinating hero fighting for acceptance.Pub Date: June 15, 2020
ISBN: 9781913359560
Page Count: 182
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Immensely enjoyable.
The debut graphic novel from Mohamed presents a modern Egypt full of magical realism where wishes have been industrialized and heavily regulated.
The story opens with a televised public service announcement from the General Committee of Wish Supervision and Licensing about the dangers of “third-class wishes”—wishes that come in soda cans and tend to backfire on wishers who aren’t specific enough (like a wish to lose weight resulting in limbs falling from the wisher’s body). Thus begins a brilliant play among magic, the mundane, and bureaucracy that centers around a newsstand kiosk where a devout Muslim is trying to unload the three “first-class wishes” (contained in elegant glass bottles and properly licensed by the government) that have come into his possession, since he believes his religion forbids him to use them. As he gradually unloads the first-class wishes on a poor, regretful widow (who then runs afoul of authorities determined to manipulate her out of her valuable commodity) and a university student who seeks a possibly magical solution to their mental health crisis (but struggles with whether a wish to always be happy might have unintended consequences), interstitials give infographic histories of wishes, showing how the Western wish-industrial complex has exploited the countries where wishes are mined (largely in the Middle East). The book is exceptionally imaginative while also being wonderfully grounded in touching human relationships, existential quandaries, and familiar geopolitical and socio-economic dynamics. Mohamed’s art balances perfectly between cartoon and realism, powerfully conveying emotions, and her strong, clean lines gorgeously depict everything from an anguished face to an ornate bottle. Charts and graphs nicely break up the reading experience while also concisely building this larger world of everyday wishes. Mohamed has a great sense of humor, which comes out in footnotes and casual asides throughout.
Immensely enjoyable.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-524-74841-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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