TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Peplum (graphic novel excerpt) Blutch Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

Introduction

In an interview after Peplum ’s first publication in book form, Blutch tells of a reader who asked himwhy he was such a difficult author. “But I don’t feel like I’m difficult at all!” he exclaimed. “I don’t understand why I get asked that. What I do is fairly simple, and not at all intellectual. Inmy stories, I try to favor action.” And in action, Blutch’s book abounds: stabbing, stoning, amputation, eye-gouging, sex, seafaring, Attic dance, pirate attacks. Yet these sequences are as artificial as they are visceral, feral and formal at once. 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. Part of this may be traced to the book’s origins. When he began serializing Peplum in 1996, Blutch was a talent to watch, a twenty-eight-year-old admired for his expressiveness of line and his experiments with dream logic and surrealism (“half Jacques Demy and half Buñuel,” he called them), but he was not yet a hero to a generation of cartoonists, and more than a decade from 175