By Vittorio Giardino (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 0-87416-033-2
After ten years, Italian graphic novelist Vittorio Giardino recently completed a trilogy of albums featuring his reluctant spy Max Fridman (transliterated into Max Friedman for the English speaking world), who was called back to the “Great Game†in the years of uneasy peace just before the outbreak of World War II.
No Pasarán! Volume 3 completed a tale of Republican Spain in the dying days of the Civil War which revealed many clues into the life of a diffident and unassuming hero who has charmed and enthralled word-wide audiences since the early 1980s, so in the earnest hope that this landmark will convince current publisher NBM (or anybody) to re-release the earlier books that are out of print I’m going to review them here over the next few months. If I make an impatient convert out of anyone, fear not. All but No Pasarán! Volume 1 are available from assorted internet retailers at reasonable prices and NBM do have copies of most of the other albums.
Born on Christmas Eve 1946 Vittorio Giardino was an electrician who switched careers at age 30. He worked for a number of comics magazines initially and his first collection Pax Romana was released in 1978. He has worked, slowly but consistently, on both feature characters such as the detective Sam Pezzo, the saucy Winsor McKay homage Little Ego and the cold-war drama Jonas Fink as well as general fiction tales producing over 35 albums to date.
In 1982 he began the tale of a quiet, bearded fellow recalled by the Deuxieme Bureau (the French Secret Service) to investigate the slaughter of almost every agent in the cosmopolitan paradise of Budapest. The series ran in four parts in the magazine Orient Express before being collected as Rhapsodie Hongroise – Giardino’s thirteenth book and in no way unlucky for him.
Friedman is a troubled, cautious man with a daughter he adores and a troubled past that somehow stems from undisclosed experiences in the Spanish Civil War where he fought as a Republican in the International Brigades against Franco’s Nationalists. Yet he is convinced – call it blackmailed – to leave his home in Switzerland and investigate the plague of assassinations.
Friedman is a hero in the mold of John le Carré’s George Smiley: a methodical thinker and the very antithesis of such combat supermen as James Bond or Napoleon Solo. Arriving in Budapest he prods and pokes about, swiftly becoming the target of not just the mysterious killers but seemingly every faction in a city crammed full of spies of every type and description from Soviet agitators to Nazi plotters. In a city of stunning, if decadent beauty where East meets West, Friedman finds that like the spy-game itself nobody and nothing can be trusted…
Somebody somewhere has a master-plan but who it is and what it is..? That’s a mystery that could get even the most careful man killed…
Giardino is a powerfully subtle writer who lets tone and nuance carry a tale and his captivating art, a semi-representational derivation of Hergé’s ligne claire or clean line makes the lovingly rendered locations as much a character in this smart, gripping drama as any of the stylishly familiar operatives of a dark, doomed world on the brink of holocaust.
Max Friedman is one of espionage literature’s greatest characters. Giardino’s work is like honey for the eyes and mind. Hungarian Rhapsody is a graphic novel any fan of comics or the Intelligence Game should know.
© 1986 Vittorio Giardino. All Rights Reserved.