Review: Blutch's Peplum is triumphant in translation

With the launch of its exciting new comics imprint, the New York Review of Books has begun translating and reprinting unknown and overlooked classics from cartooning history. The 1997 sword-and-sandal epic Peplum, by the furiously inky artist known as Blutch, marks the first translation in the publisher's catalogue – and thus serves as a gauntlet thrown down with imperious conviction. Breakneck in its pacing, allusive and rich in its classical cadences (as translated by Edward Gauvin), Peplum tells the story of a lowborn Roman subject who steals a nobleman's identity and transports a beautiful woman, frozen in ice, through the ragged outposts of the Empire, hoping the intensity of his devotion will thaw her. Freely adapting passages from Shakespeare's Caesar and Petronius's Satyricon, Blutch draws cities like Grosz, atrocities like Goya and gardens like Matisse. Peplum's broad strokes may thus seem familiar – the hero undergoes an odyssey where he is beset by pirates, bound by barbarians, ravaged by an Amazon and tempted away from his prize by a comely boy-servant – but the execution is all Blutch's own, confounding and febrile, like some dream version of myth.