Peplum

The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden still in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels.

Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and The Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.

Blutch is an award-winning, highly influential French cartoonist. He has published almost two dozen books since his 1988 comic debut in the legendary avant-garde magazineFluide Glacial, including Mitchum, Le Petit Christian, and So Long, Silver Screen, his only previous book to be published in English. His illustrations appear inLes Inrockuptibles, Liberation, and The New Yorker.

Edward Gauvin has translated more than a hundred and fifty graphic novels and is a two-time winner of the John Dryden Translation Competition. He is the contributing editor for Francophone comics atWords Without Borders.