Crecy (2007)
written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Raulo Caceres
A little like Miller’s 300, this is a comic recreation of a historical battle. But that’s where the similes end. By all accounts this shouldn’t work. There are no heroes and there’s no glorification of war and heroic ideals, the main character is a bastard and so is everyone else. Crecy is decidedly anti-glorification (could be because this battle marked the end of chivalry). It’s a fifty pages long rant or lecture (you decide), by one of the participating longbowmen, about the fight at Crecy. The narrator takes center place all the time, lecturing and talking directly to the reader. There’s no real plot, while lecturing the reader, the events of the battle at Crecy unfold.
Make no mistake, the longbowman is Warren Ellis dreaming himself into the mind of a longbowman fighting at Crecy. The attitude and the mind at work is all Ellis’s. There’s one particularly sentence that stuck with me, an excellent verbalization of a simple yet far reaching insight (“We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don’t have the same cumulative knowledge you do.”). So why does the comic work, despite being more of lecture than a story, despite being about some past battle most people don’t care or know about.
Well, because Ellis makes it entertaining. In all these past years Ellis has perfected the technique of the infodump. Here he does it by shooting a densely packed information bomb steganographically hidden under a string of cunt this, asshole that, without the reader realizing that his brain has just absorbed some facts or ideas. Then there’s the art by Caceres. Reminds me of copper engravings. Very fitting.
Rating: 5/5
Samurai Executioner (1972-1976)
by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima
Samurai Executioner is about Yamada Asaemon, a ronin, who works as sword-tester for the shogun and also has to execute criminals. It takes place in the Edo period of feudal Japan and is above all, a very interesting view at the life of common people in that time in Japan. Since one of the main duties of Asaemon, and the one the series of ten volumes mostly concentrates on, is the beheading of criminals, it’s also a very contemplative series about death and the many reasons why people do things that earns them their fate (and whether fate exist and is avoidable or not). Despite it’s long run, there’s no big story arc, it’s a series of shorter and longer vignettes that mostly tell the last tales of those that get chopped down. At times it can be a little repetitive, but overall it makes you come back again.
Yamada Asaemon, despite his occupation, isn’t a bloodthirsty man. While he’s completely devoted to fulfilling his job, there are hints throughout the series that imply that he hopes that in the future, society will abolish the death penalty (not much luck there). Since most common people also avoid any social contact with him, out of fear, he mostly lives in isolation, apart from those people he gets into contact while doing his job. This may sound like a series full of tragedy, and while there are many moments that are indeed tragic, it never feels too downbeat. Life goes on. If the series is about anything at all, it’s about those things that make life worthy living. Moments of love, of friendship, of closely connecting to other people and being alive at all.
Rating: 4/5
