#2 The History of Holy Russia (1854)

This book could also have been called, "A Petty French Douche Talks About How Much Russia Sucks."

Gustave Dore had done previous comic-style books, but this one was his longest and most ambitious. A lot of care went into this book, with hundreds of illustrations and groundbreaking use of empty space and art flowing into text, all in the service of showing how shitty Russians were as a people and a nation. It becomes obvious as you go through the book that Dore was extremely butthurt about Napoleon's failure in 1812, and proceeds to talk shit about the Russian's pride in 1812. In this book, Russians are portrayed as barely human, murdering people to the point where, in one image, you can see people actually swimming in a river of blood. Heads are chopped off repeatedly, and sections are devoted into debates on which torture devices are preferable. Russian leaders are shown as dumbasses who randomly die if kidney problems, and Catherine's orgies are described as "so vile" that Dore couldn't even draw a depiction of them, and instead opted to draw a Roman orgy, which he says was more delicate and tame compared to a Russian orgy.

As a comic book, we still don't have dialog bubbles, and the format is still pictures above descriptive text. Borderline stick figures are sometimes used for tiny drawings of humans, a pictures vary from being detailed line drawings to what look like mere sketches. The art is really clever as well. On one page there's just a series of blank panels, and on another moving music scales. Sometimes there'll be a huge picture that takes up an entire page with a minimum of text, and at other times there'll be a shitload of text with a small image accompanying it. It has a narrative as a "history" text, and so there is a feeling of progression that occurs as the book goes on. Unfortunately, the momentum really starts to peter out near the end, and some of the final pages are uninteresting and annoying to get through.

This book also has that irritatingly pretentious habit that old writers have of throwing untranslated Latin into their writing. I don't know what the climate was at the time, but a comic like this was clearly meant for a "lower" audience, and therefore they probably didn't retain their Latin that they learned in school. I could be wrong though. As a modern reader, seeing untranslated Latin just seems like the writer's a snooty douchebag who needs a hard kick in the balls.


As an evolution of the form, this is clearly superior to Obadiah Oldbuck, and a hell of a lot more ambitious. Even the random shit ties into the overall theme of Russia being crap. There was some funny stuff in the book, and I really liked a lot of the drawings, but it's hard to get past the blatant propaganda of it all. Reading a history of this book, apparently it was a commercial failure, as all propaganda deserves to be. The price was too high, and the French weren't that thrilled about going to war again. So, ha ha, in your face, Dore.

For a much, much better and more in-depth look at this book, go here: http://www.indyworld.com/indy/summer_2004/kartalopoulos_dore/index.html

Unfortunately, because the editor of the 1001 series doesn't give a rat's ass about availability, this book is currently out of print and hard to find. I got mine via an inter-library loan, so if you live in the US you can probably ask your local library to request it. Because of the book's historical value most copies seem to be in university libraries, so if you're a college student you may find it there.

Next up: Max and Moritz, which, thankfully, can be found online.