Democracy: dark picture

Papadatos known for the graphic work Logicomix (2008), about a foundational quest in mathematics, along with Kawa and Di Donna (who also contributed to Logicomix), opens the tale in 490 B.C.E. with the Athenians at war with the Persian tyrant Darius. Leander (of the ancient Greek myth of Hero and Leander), a young man with a talent for art who spends his days painting the stories of Greek mythology. In much the same way, Papadatos and his collaborators paint a vivid picture of ancient Athens with all its conflicts, conspiracies, old gods, and new greed.

Leander trying to rouse his comrades for morrow’s battle against a far mightier enemy, and  begins to recount his own life. We see democracy originated through a combination of chance and historical contingency. Democracy is an historical fiction exploring the birth of a new political system in ancient Greece. It is the tale of daring, danger and big ideas of the death of the gods and the tortuous birth of democracy. Pericles, a statesman and general of the Athens during the city’s golden age.

In time, Leander falls in with the aristocrat Cleisthenes, one of a triumvirate credited with the birth of democratic ideals, along with the statesmen Solon and Ephialtes. “Maybe something’s coming,” Cleisthenes says to the crowd. “Something that will crystallize Athenian culture into an entirely different form, one better suited to survival.” Leander who stands for the common man but struggles to understand how these new ideas are necessary to end the old system of tyranny and fear. This is history in its elements, and by presenting it in the graphic form, the creators leave the world history accessible for younger readers. Kawa explains “We wanted to tell the story of people like us, who, throughout history, have to face the tidal waves brought on by cataclysmic events and make sense of them.”

Democracy by Alkecos Papdatos, Abraham Kawa and Annie Di Donna

Bloomsbury

£18.99 /$27

240 pages