Hypericum

No two consecutive Manuele Fior books have looked much alike until now, although they have always felt like the same mind at work: thinking about craft, and mark-making through that craft. This line of inquiry doesn't necessarily rule out vivid emotion beaming into a reader's quivering cortex at 10,000 volts, but Fior might not have had that aspect of comics as his top priority. At their edgiest, books like Red Ultramarine and 5,000 km Per Second (published in English by Fantagraphics in 2019 and 2016 respectively) knew about around the prickly affect of harsh expressionist ink strokes, but the man holding the brush sat at a remove, observing from some distance.

Lately, though, Fior seems to have found a state of grace, following the path of many an artist and becoming entranced by daylight. Celestia (Fantagraphics, 2021) lowered a reader into soft hugs of gouache and watercolors to show a slightly fantastical Venice and its rural surroundings, catching the cerulean blue of Adriatic skies and the pastel colored buildings under them. Fior trained as an architect, and sees a divine hand at work when late afternoon sunlight strikes a dusty south-facing balustrade at a flattering angle. Celestia was informed by architecture, and also by the arts: one character was drawn to look like Igor Stravinsky, and others driving in the countryside passed through shifting horizontal bands of ocher and brown, a dreamtime corridor into the Mark Rothko dimension.

It must have been artistically rewarding, since Fior has now stuck with a similar toolkit for Hypericum - although the palette has been slightly adjusted into the colors of sandstone and silicates, and the ruling faculty now isn't fine arts but history. A core Fior story template has survived as well: two individuals, living within a built environment and its conventions, become engaged with where it came from and what might be happening outside it. The main change for Hypericum is a dose of narrative realism, since Fior leaves out the fantasy elements that have seasoned his books and sets this one in the real world, during what will turn out to be a specific recent period. Productive friction builds up between the quotidian day-to-day nature of this plot and the aesthetics of Fior's art, and now that the book has been picked up by Fantagraphics from Europe Comics (which employed the slightly different title "Hypericon" but the same translator, Matt Madden), those artisan brush strokes can be seen on paper rather than corralled into an all-digital business model.

Reading on a screen might have some specific dissonance for Hypericum, since the story is about the past poking metaphorically into the present and probing it for weaknesses. It starts with a frontispiece illustration showing the funeral mask of Tutankhamen as a graffito on the side of a modern Berlin building; the boy pharaoh and his treasures soon assume a role in Fior's narrative. So does the ancient healing power of St John's Wort, a plant with medicinal properties known for millennia and here taken as a cure for insomnia by protagonist Teresa, newly arrived in Berlin from Italy and unsettled. It's not clear from the book's initial pages and Fior's rendering how old Teresa actually is; short and gawky and button-nosed, she might be a child traveling alone to a big foreign city, but is in fact a foreign student there on a scholarship to assist in preparing an exhibit on Tutankhamen's treasure. She hooks up with Ruben, who is her counterpart in all ways. Tall, spindly and argumentative, he is a rich kid bumming around on dad's money and retouching celebrity photographs for gossip magazines - a very modern exercise in falsifying history. More sure of her footing in the past than the present, Teresa's bedside reading is the memoir written by the Egyptologist Howard Carter after his excavations in the Valley of the Kings during 1922, and Fior wrenches himself away from German sunlight to illustrate Carter's descent into dark, sandy burial chambers, where the only light source is a candle. The modern sequences occur inside panels with borders, while Howard Carter and the tomb raiding of '22 have no inked perimeters, hanging unsupported in eternity.

But modern Berlin's vacant lots seem to be covered in sand too, with rusting cars and military hardware abandoned there waiting for their own archaeologists. Berlin, it is said, stands at a moment of change and transformation, much like the people in it. "We're twenty years old on the cusp of a new millennium," Teresa muses, just as history is about to put its foot down. It turns out—and this is not much of a spoiler, since Fior has discussed it freely in interviews—that Hypericum's modern sequences are taking place in the run up to September 11th, 2001, which arrives with two full-page images of the Twin Towers in flames against another clear blue sky. What this does for the story might depend on your view of real world events (or this one in particular) arriving as if up through a stage trapdoor to redirect narratives and unnerve protagonists, rather than organic character development doing that instead. The original European publication of this book was in 2022, so even then it was a bit tardy to ride the small wave of work directly commenting on 9/11's 20th anniversary.¹ Bryan Talbot recently brought the World Trade Center into the end of The Legend of Luther Arkwright (also 2022), a book about whether history is inescapable no matter how you adjust the controls. But Talbot's perspective is political while Fior's is personal, his two 21st century moderns having the requisite modernist epiphany via CNN. The book's delicate subtleties disassemble a bit as this particularly large hammer descends.

Celestia, where a more imaginary Italy was under attack from a less defined enemy ravaging the country, suggested that a better future was taking shape out in the margins where the children were regrouping; that Europe was in dire straits, but the adults should get out of the road because the kids were alright. Hypericum's kids include Teresa and Ruben, plus the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen, and an outside fate turns out to have been in control of all three. "You have to admit, we've had a pretty good run until now," sighs Ruben fatalistically, watching Lower Manhattan disappear behind the smoke. After being submerged in their own concerns, he and Teresa emerge into the sunlight just in time for what looks like the start of the end of history.

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