In marginal cultures there’s always a tendency to imitate the forms of more powerful cultural agents. This can go as far as dropping any aspects specific to said cultures as if they were a shameful ballast. In comics, an already marginal form of art, this peril is doubled and way too often we are left with shallow superhero stories strung together from disparate tropes, troublesome reappropriations of japanese affectations or generic and sterile adventure cliches. In this context, a comic such as Black Foustanela by Nunstuck Slotermayera is a remarkable presence. Not only because it is unabashedly Greek in its subject, but because it uses a tarantinoesque melange of influences to address the cultural (and actual) imperialism which surrounds its existence, while telling the story of The Greek War of Independance by the way of an ultra-violent and over-sexualized farce.

The comic opens with an eminamentally Balkan sequence where a sheep herder, draped in the national costume he sits in serenity and communion with nature. Using his flute, he sublimates into music whatever complex existential load his soul is bearing. Something indescribable and pure, hinting at how our adamic ancestors must have felt in the Garden of Eden. But his solace, and the aesthetic unity of the comic is perturbed by a friend running so fast that he leaves a cloud of dust behind, not unlike how they do in some action manga, warning Black Foustanela that his darling, Mayrovoulits, was kidnaped by the Turkish noble Horny-bey. This sets up an episodic quest narrative not unlike that of King Arthur’s in the Monty Phyton production … or Mario’s.

Black Foustanela quickly track tracks down the effendi and dispatches him with masterful sword fighting, only to find that someone beat him to his prize and his loved one is nowhere to be found.

So far, the story announces itself as just a violent interpretation of a fairytale. But there is an undercurrent of something else. Even the dynamic way in which Foustanela kills Horny-bey and his servants announces a grand metafictional adventure through the way the action sequence borrows tropes from samurai and western fiction and is presented with graphical approaches borrowed from manga. This is where the melting pot of influences overflows. Slotemayera’s is marked by japanese comics, but his approach is hardly tributare. Rather, in the same vein as Bastian Vives’s Last Man or Giannis Milonogiannis (also Greek), he cleanly synthesises a personal style and storytelling sensibilities with foreign techniques for a strong, cohesive way of presenting and telling stories in comics. His line is thin, barely modulated, suggesting shapes more than sculpting form. But the forms are appropriate and expressive: look at how the characters are holding their hands, for example. Instead of rendering through crosshatches he uses various tones of gray to hint at details in his images without encumbering them with additional marks. This makes the drawing feel informal and light, but what marks are made are done so with studied precision. This informality makes for swift and impressive action sequences, expressive shouting matches, but more importantly is sufficiently elastic to keep the ever-increasing number of intentional anachronisms from breaking the comic apart. Which is a risk present at every turn since the story becomes increasingly iconoclastic, essayistic and metatextual.

Starting anew his search for Mayrovoulits, Foustanela arrives at a crossroad where, in typical fairy tale fashion, he meets Virtue and Vice embodied by two women. One fully-clothed in traditional attire standing firm and stiff, the other covered in transparent silk and oriental jewelry, putting her body on display. The hero must make a choice between them, a symbolic one. Instead he rapes the two and steals their supplies when they refuse to help in his quest. This is extremely troubling. I would want to believe it shows that this, and by extension Greece’s, story is not one about choices between right or wrong, but about power wielded and abused. But even if this was the case, it would be a point made in very bad taste. Worse than that, I think the cavalier depiction of rape is just lack of awareness and maybe a misguided part of the rebellious spirit that animates the comic. It remains the only major flaw I find in it.

In the next scene, the arguably unheroic protagonist meets three hags, of the shakespearean kind more than the ancient Hecate, who offer him a vision via an oversized joint. Here, we learn about Greece’s birth as a modern nation state, the mingling and the political struggles between foreign powers and about the fight of a peloponnesian rebel army to establish a government. The scene also starts a polemic about the very notion of a nation as it’s been propagated from the French Revolution onward. Foustanela is aware that Greece is inhabited by a plurality of peoples, ethnic groups and creeds and calling all of them ”greek” might present some problems.

In another sequence of events Foustanela encounters the flagships of three fleets coming to “liberate” Greece from Ottoman rule. One is manned by the British, portrayed as various Muppets characters, accompanied by the Greek politician Alexandros Mavrokordatos who has no real desire for unity and independence, just want for power. Another is of the French who simply want to stick their nose where the British already have, in a bout of jealousy, not to spread the revolutionary ideals they birthed. Lastly, the Russian’s is helmed by a lecherous patriarch claiming to help his ortodox brothers, but truly is just jumping at the chance to “nibble” from the Ottoman Empire before the British and the French consume it entirely. Seeing the wannabe saviours, Foustanela realizes that the only way for Greece to survive intact would be for the revolutionary army and the Egyptian-Ottoman one to make peace.

In the end Foustanela engineers a stand-off between the English, revolutionary and Ottoman armies, letting the would-be saviours stumble into each other and giving Greece a chance at independence. To top it all off, he find his beloved.

It’s not exactly an easy comic to parse and while its efforts to educate surely aren’t in vain, it would benefit from at least a cursory knowledge of modern Greek history and culture. I had to read it with Wikipedia pages opened up in order to get who some characters are and what is their role in the events.Even so it manages to be informative, even if at times problematic, evocative (the forced construction of a nation-state and the way different empires treated a country as their own playground hit close to home) and hugely enjoyable in no small part to the author’s control of the comics’ visual language.