I just put down Casanova: Gula IV and I am forced to wonder aloud (yet again) why all of you aren't reading this series. If you like comics, and have ever wondered why you bother reading the medium in the first place when everything seems dull and disposable: read Casanova.
I don't know what it is about this series, but it just brings the best out of write Matt Fraction. He's authoring this year's major event for Marvel, "Fear Itself," and is a big enough name there that I think I have to stop calling him a rising star. I've read, and even wrote once about, some of his work with Marvel properties. It's good; it's quite good.
But he comes alive with Casanova. Part of me just wants to say that it's being freed from the restrictions of a franchise, and that might be so. The maddening complexity of Casanova had to start from a blank slate, free to tangle in its own web. But it feels like a cop-out to just chalk it up to artistic freedom.
Were I to hazard a guess, I'd wager that Casanova has some kind of personal connection to Fraction. He might have even said so. I've done a bad job of reading the pages he writes in the back of each issue, so maybe there are key pieces of the story behind the story that I am missing. But Casanova feels like a personal, opus work.
I should point out that his is the one of the very few series I've read that can drop the f-bomb and not come off sounding sophomoric. Fraction just works his magic like that.
This is also the series that introduced me to the masterful work of Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bà. I hope I did the little accent mark correctly there; please forgive me if I didn't. Anyway, the two Brazilian artists -- twin brothers -- trade off between story arcs, and lends a flair all its own. They have a look I really like, able to be loose and sketchy while always graceful and precise.
They've done other work you might have seen -- BPRD 1946 and 1947, their Day Tripper series, among others. If you won't read Casanova, then do try and track down some of their work. There's some amazing comic book work coming out of South America, and these guys are proof of that.
The strongest endorsement of their work on Casanova is that I simply could not image the series being done by anyone else. I've heard that might change in the third story arc of the series, and we'll see how that goes. But their work in the first two arcs perfectly embodied these characters.
I will admit, this series does have a fair amount of sex and violence, and cusses galore. If you can't stomach that, then pass and I would never hold it against you. But if that's not a problem, and you want to see some truly inventive work being done in comics go out right now, and order Casanova: Luxuria. Devour it, read Gula, and then wait with bated breath for the third series.
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