The Golden Vine

By Regie Rigby

I’m feeling a little self-indulgent this week.

Oh, all right. I’m feeling a little more self-indulgent than usual.

If you’ve been reading this column over the last few weeks you know that I have a strong affection for the ancient stories and heroes of Greece. If you’ve been reading for a little longer than that you’ll also know that I’m a huge fan of the work published by the pan continental publisher Shoto Press.

This week I get to talk about both, because Shoto Press have produced a book about the legacy of Alexander the Great.

I really couldn’t be happier…

I have a bit of a soft spot for Alexander, who my wife and I seem to be following around. He was the first absolutely Greek thing we encountered when we arrived in Greece a couple of weeks ago, since we landed at Alexander the Great Airport in the Macedonian city of Thesaloniki. (With bizarre indecision the authorities also see fit to refer to this facility as “Macedonia Airport” and “Thesaloniki Airport”, but hey…) We also encountered him a few years ago in Egypt, when our guide pointed out that records showed that it had been his men, if not him personally, who had been responsible for the vandalism perpetrated on the statues known as the Colossi of Memnon. (Our guide also pointed out that when Alexander caused them to be damaged the statues had already stood for 1,500 years. Egypt is old.)

He is also a fascinating character because he achieved so much in such a short space of time. Alexander’s father, Phillip the Macedon, turned himself from the ruler of a backward and uncouth kingdom on the northern edge of Greek land to the leader of a unified Greece. Alexander took his father’s achievements and forged them into a Greek Empire that encompassed most of the known world – conquering the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Persia and reaching India before death claimed the young warrior at the age of 33.

This is, on the face of it, tragically young, but as Dr. Eldon Tyrell so rightly said “The flame that burns twice as brightly burns half as long” and it is fair to say that Alexander burned very very brightly indeed – by the time he was my age he was effectively the king of the world. Impressive by anyone’s standards I think you’ll agree.

But the end of Alexander’s story is frankly a little unsatisfactory. Having driven powerful enemies screaming before him, installing his own Pharaoh in Egypt (founding the Ptolemaic Dynasty which lasted until that unfortunate incident with Caesar, Brutus, Cleopatra and an Asp) and crushing those ancient scourges of Greece the Persians, Alexander the Great died of a “mystery illness”. Worse than that, far from going out in a blaze of glory Alexander’s final campaign, his attempt to conquer India had ended in ignominious failure.

This, I have always felt, was one of the occasions where history quite simply got it wrong. Alexander the Great was more than just a hero, more than just a warrior, more than just a king. If he was going to die young then he deserved to die in battle. If he was going to die in bed then it should have been at a great age with a truly global Empire to leave to his heirs.

A lingering and fevered demise, with no clear successor and an empire doomed to collapse in a maelstrom of political intrigue and infighting is so anticlimactic. Just because things happened in a particular way doesn’t mean they should’ve. And this is the nice thing about History – you can change it. A quick application of fiction and you can tell the story the way would have been told in the first place if history had been paying attention.

This is where the creators of The Golden Vine come in. The script, fashioned by Jai Sen, who wrote the exquisite Garlands of Moonlight and co-wrote The Ghost of Silver Cliff Shoto Press’s two previous offerings, does not take the easy route of merely acting as a biography of Alexander. That after all has been done many times before. Instead, Sen pursues an alternate history. In this alternate world Alexander does not destroy the Persian city of Persepolis (now in Iran) but makes it the centre of his Empire. He does not die aged 33 after defeat in India, but lives on to expand his Empire, pushing further and further into the unknown until he is truly the World Emperor.

True, the story begins with the death of the great man, but a death at a great age leaving a stable Empire to a clear heir, rather than the In testate mess left behind in reality. The story concerns the efforts of Alexander’s son (the imaginatively named Alexander – why do royal dynasties have such little imagination when it comes to naming their kids?) to discover the secret which provided the base of his father’s success. Why didn’t he destroy Persepolis, the capital of the hated Persians? What was his secret?

The story is told in three parts. The first, narrated by “Uncle” Hephaestion, lover of Alexander the Great and, by the time the story of The Golden Vine unfolds, King of Persia. Hephaestion tells the young Alexander IV about the childhood of the Great Emperor and the beginnings of the Empire in a conversation which lasts a whole day. At the end of their conversation he presents the young prince with a collection of letters written by Alexander himself as he travelled to expand the empire and we learn some of the story in the great man’s own words.

But the letters still don’t unravel the mystery, and for reasons I won’t divulge here Hephaestion is unable to reveal the final secret, forcing the young Alexander IV to solve the riddle himself, while all around him a conspiracy threatens to unravel everything his father achieved. The reader is drawn in to young Alexander’s quest, as the young prince who has just inherited an empire tries to uncover the secrets and the intentions of a father he barely knew.

Epic in its scope, at times tense, at times comic, at times quite moving the story of The Golden Vine is a complex tapestry of history, fiction and carefully drawn characterisation. Sen has woven a plausable alternate history around the “real” historical events, and breathed new life into characters who for the last two and a half thousand years or so have been nothing more than tantalising names on paper.

It is true that Alexander the Great perished of a fever aged just thirty three, but how many people have wondered how history would have been changed had he lived? It is true that Alexander IV was assassinated aged thirteen, shortly after being revealed as the heir to Alexander the Great. But what if he too had lived? It is true that the real Hephaestion has haunted the histories, and that nobody really knows what his relationship to Alexander really was. It is true that Alexander the Great was thought by many to have been involved, with his mother, in the assassination of his father Phillip the Macedon.

Sen takes all of this and makes it real. I can think of no greater tribute to his skill as a wordsmith than to say that for three hundred pages characters long dead lived and breathed for me. Places that have been dots on archaeological maps or fascinating ruins I have visited (and I must say it was fascinating to read The Golden Vine just a couple of weeks after touring the ruins of many of the places we visit in the book – it is possible now to walk around the ruins of Pella, ancient capital of Macedonia, and what is believed to be the tomb of Phillip the Macedon – which was designed by Alexander the Great) suddenly took shape and became not ruins, but vibrant cities.

Of course much of this is due to the art, and the design of the book. Now, regular readers will know that the first two offerings from Shoto Press left me gasping for my very breath, so beautiful was the artwork. If you took my advice and bought copies of Garlands of Moonlight and The Ghost of Silver Cliff (and if you didn’t, can I suggest that you do so immediately?) you will already know that both of those books blended monochrome linework with silver inks to create a subtle but powerful effect.

The Golden Vine takes a different but no less innovative approach to book design. The Golden Vine is produced in full colour, and as befits the title, metallic gold ink is used to heighten certain panels. I’ll be honest – when I heard that this would be the case I was a little dubious. Gold is tricky to do convincingly and if not handled with great care can make art look a little tacky. While the silver inks in the Malay Mysteries books blended with the monochrome lines to produce a sort of “pencil sketch” effect, I worried that the mix of colour and gold would look, well, gaudy.

I should have more faith, I really should.

The art is stunning. Except for the panels which feature the eponymous Golden Vine the metallics are used as accent points, the glint just catching your eye and drawing your attention to different parts of the page. In the scenes which do feature the vine the effect is a little overwhelming, but that after all, is the point.

The art itself is a carefully matched bled of styles, each one perfectly matched to the area of the book it illustrates. Those sections which occur in the “present” of the young Alexander IV are presented by Umeka Asayuki in a bright and clean lined style, the vibrancy of palette provided by colourist Bobby Widjaya emphasising the immediacy of this section of story which is in turn a device to link the other aspects of the book together and a journey of discovery in its own right.

The second section of the story tells of Hephaestion’s memories and is presented in a slightly softer mangaesque style by Seijuro Mizu, with a more muted palette provided by Alexander Andy symbolising perhaps the dulling of events as they pass into history. This section of the book is also pretty much devoid of gold, again perhaps emphasising that the events related by Hephaestion occur before the birth of the golden empire of Alexander.

The third section in which Alexander the Great’s own letters tell the fictional story of his ongoing world conquest is illustrated in a more “western” style by Shino Motsumoto with subtle, almost sepia colouring by Heru Arman. I’m not sure how they managed this, but in spite of the predominantly sepia tone of this section, when I think of the pages in my head I see them in full colour.

The Golden Vine is a painstakingly researched, imaginatively constructed and fluently told story which drips in symbolism and prophesy. The illustrative team have matched the mood Sen creates and I think it is fair to say that every panel adds another detail to the narrative – someting every comic should aspire to achieve but few ever manage. As I have already observed, I’m a real fan of Shoto Press, and I think this book goes a long way to explaining why.

Basically, whatever you want form your comics, you will find it between these covers. Gripping stores, sympathetic and well-drawn characters, stunning art, great design and innovative techniques. I’m sure The Golden Vine isn’t perfect – nothing in life is. But if it isn’t perfect, it’s so close that I can’t spot the flaw.

I know I say this every time they publish something at Shoto, but I only keep repeating it because I’m right.

You owe it to yourself to read this.

Go and do it now.

---

Join Regie on a Fool's Errand, where he'll respond to you comments, bouquets and brickbats, plus give you insight into his own brand wisdom.

---