Lion Forge’s Magnetic Collection brings another English translation of a European graphic novel to American readers with Edouard Cour’s “Herakles” Book One, fashioning the story of the mythological hero’s fabled twelve labors into a lyrical examination of what it means to be burdened with great power.
Written by Edouard CourCover by Edouard Cour
Illustrated by Edouard Cour
Translated by Jeremy MelloulA colorful and fresh retelling of the classic Greek myth of Herakles, half-human son of Zeus, and his many adventures as an infamous demigod.
From the early pages, it’s clear that “Herakles” is not the retelling of the Herakles story from your high school English class. It is at once irreverent and modern while still being buttressed by the spirit of the classic myth. Cour eschews the classical representation of the powerful demigod. This Herakles is a lumbering lump of a figure with giant hands and wide feet who moves with video game-like agility, dispatching the objectives of his labors with what seems like ruthless, clever, and sometimes clumsy efficiency until a dialogue balloon informs readers that a long time has passed. The story encased in these 160 brisk pages spans years, even decades—it’s uncertain, and it doesn’t really matter. What does seem to matter is the emotional and psychological toll that each labor takes on the hero. This Herakles is haunted by his past, quite literally. He is also haunted by his parentage, being visited by towering silhouettes that represent the pantheon of Greek gods with which he can commune without an intermediary.
Driven to act by these specters, Herakles could easily be a one-dimensional cipher for the machinations of the divine, but he is clearly driven by something more akin to a desire to do penance, to battle and embrace the brutality of his nature. Cour communicates these ideas by choosing to spend as much time wallowing in viscera as he does infusing the proceedings with humor. Cour also uses an organic sense of pacing, lingering on some moments and then skipping over others to achieve the most effective and yet most unconventional storytelling results possible.
Through it all, Cour’s artwork maintains a cartoonist’s ebullience (no matter what is being depicted), and Herakles’s face registers little emotion. His beard often hides his mouth, and his eyes are unwavering almond-like slits with dots for pupils (save for one panel where puppy dog eyes are played for an effective laugh). Instead, Cour chooses to convey Hercules’s emotional range through his posture—slumping his shoulders, bowing his head, and bending his giant Kirby-like digits. Cour achieves texture through thin and thick hatching, giving the artwork a jagged immediacy. The pages appear to be scanned directly from pencils, an aesthetic that could use more representation in modern sequential storytelling.
Enough cannot be said about the visual of humor of the book. Cour embraces the intersection of mythological and comic book ridiculous with panache, infusing the book’s proceedings with a kind of disarmingly breezy effortlessness. These labors look like more fun than anything, perhaps a commentary on the way the results of one’s hard work can sometimes be diminished by casual observers or their masters. It’s the curse of being so good at something that one can often commit the cardinal sin of making it look easy. At times, Cour’s Herakles struck me as a kind of Forrest Gump in reverse. Instead of unwittingly stumbling into and giving humanity to some of the most important moments in history, his well-meaning and legendary feats of prowess seem to open the door for more misery and further manipulation. Even when he’s at his most good-natured, he often finds himself and those he cares about worse off than they were before—the central tragedy of Herakles’s earthbound existence.
Just as enough can’t be said about the visual humor, the tragic moments are handled with equal aplomb, often playing with scale to show the giant hero adrift and alone in a world both of his own making as well as a victim of something for which he didn’t ask. For all his might, he’s a figure who is not at home or truly welcome on either Earth or Olympus, and Cour makes this clear without ever stating it explicitly.
Continued belowAt the conclusion of the book, Cour has provided a sublimely succinct one-page appendix for the characters represented in this first volume, complete with instantly recognizable silhouetted icons depicting their likenesses, but even if readers unfamiliar with the Herakles myth return immediately to the beginning now armed with this information, this simply will not do. The testament to this work is that it sent me scrambling for my yellowed paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Wikipedia seemed like a soulless alternative. This is not to say that Cour’s book is somehow incomplete, but it does assume a certain level of familiarity with the underlying material upon which this narrative builds, allowing the work to hit more emotional beats than would be allowed by a dense mythological history. And it certainly hits those beats without being maudlin. In the end, “Herakles” does what all great pieces of art do. It sends consumers of it out into the world to learn more.
Cour’s mastery of the tone of this book is equal to his mastery of the narrative elements. A graphic designer by training, Cour manipulates the reader in the most benevolent of ways, serving the story he’s interested in telling at every turn. It’s a clever high wire act that doesn’t falter. “Herakles” is a tour de force, and judging by the acknowledgments in the front matter, a true labor of love. I eagerly await the second volume.
