Venezia: The Hilarious Italian Rom-Com/Farce

“Venezia” is going to be difficult to explain for two reasons:

First, you need to have some knowledge of 16th century European history to better understand what’s going on. The book lays it out for you, but still…

Second, this is a farcical comedy about two people with second identities, and the conflicting feelings they have about one another based on their identities, which they don’t realize are the same people.

See? I can’t even make it make grammatical sense.

Let’s try to sort this out, because I genuinely and honestly love the heck out of this book. It’s the kind of comedy you just don’t see attempted in comics that often, and Trondheim and Parme nail it.

Credits Dell’arte

Some 16th Century European History

The very first panel of the book has all the exposition you need to get to the point of the story, so long as you have some background in 16th century European history.

That ain’t me.

Honestly, I care very little about figuring out who the various kings and queens of Europe have been for the last thousand years. I stink at those categories on Jeopardy!. It’s just not a point of interest for me.

After some Wikipedia and Google digging, though, I think I can explain it a little better for you. To make a short story, long:

In the 16th century, there was a strong rivalry between the French monarch, King Francis I, and the Spanish leader, King Charles V, also known as “Charles Quint” because “quint” means five. Sort of.

One of the points of contention was the city of Venice, whose recent history at the time was a series of alliances that would give you whiplash if you laid it all out end to end.

So the French and the Spanish each send a spy to Venus to keep an eye on things, and to intervene and keep anything from happening there that might impact them.

Trondheim’s script explains it in a far funnier way, but I think laying it out more simply might help.

Onto the comic:

The Strangest Historical Rom-Com of All Time?

Those are the two characters you see on the cover, Cantabella of France (on the cover to the left) and Pintorello from Spain (the big-chinned muscular guy on the right). They arrive at the same time in the city, immediately hate each other. The whole book is filled with their rivalry, their sharp tongues, their conflicted self-interests, and the occasional near-death experiences. Along the line, there’s an attraction brewing…

Here’s the twist: Cantabella is visiting Venice as a much-lauded singer (her name means “Beautiful Singing,” after all!), ready to perform for the highest level of government and, for the right price, private individuals. But when she’s performing her daring spy work, she dresses up as a 16th century catwoman named “The Black Scorpion” on behalf of France.

Pintorello is a portrait painter, visiting the same local official as a means to access inside information about trade routes. At night, he loses his wig and mustache to become “The Eagle,” taking action for the sake of Spain’s interests.

Here’s the part where you need to suspend your disbelief and realize this is a sit-com setting: Despite the two arriving together and taking an immediate dislike of one another, when they’re in their “costumes” and doing their jobs, they don’t recognize one another at all and have a completely different kind of relationship. There’s a fun, playful rivalry. It’s a complete Will They or Won’t They kind of situation.

Professionally, there’s a grudging level of respect between the two, but things get more complicated when one sees the other out of costume. The interactions between these four separate personalities makes for a building level of farcical tension and humor. Trondheim piles on the complications, making the relationships delightfully more complicated as the book goes on.

But it is never so outlandish that he loses you. Roll with the punches and try to keep up. With every twist and turn, you want to see more. As a bonus, you’re laughing your way through the whole thing because the situational humor is so strong. The lies — including false names that include varieties of pasta shapes — pile up fast.

While the answer to all of this is simple — just confess who you are to each other, or wait for one person to make some kind of mistake so it can all be laid out — you don’t want that to happen. You want to see how far Trondheim can take it. It’s too much fun.

The strength of the book is the way Trondheim peppers their dialogue with a kind of bickering back-and-forth patter that gets a laugh in every other panel. He sets up situations wonderfully and pays them off in surprising ways.

In many ways, this style of book reminds me of the classic Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis era of “Justice League.” The action is a good excuse to get the characters in uncomfortable situations so they can reveal themselves in hilarious ways.

The Art of Fabrice Parme

As good as Trondheim’s script is, Parme’s art in this book is what glues your eyes to the page. It’s fantastic on every level.

Parme’s art is super heavily stylized. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that he has some animation background. His characters have unique and exaggerated silhouettes. Pintorello is the top heavy guy with the enormous chin. Cantabella is the one with the large forehead and the tiny waist. Every character in this book is an exaggeration.

It reminds me a bit of when the Batman animated series changed its style and moved from a more “realistic” look to a more stylized one. Lots of straight lines against curves, and more angles. Less realism and more extreme motions. It’s a style that I thought worked better in the comics than on the animated series. For similar reasons, it’s probably why I like the looks of this comic so much.

For as many memorable one-liners as Trondheim lays down in this book, they’re all sold by Parme. There’s no doubt in my mind that a lesser artist would not punctuate the sharp writing as well as Parme does here. His staging is second to none. His comedic timing is wonderful. His panel to panel work is easy to follow.

Check out that two panel sequence above and see how subtly she stabs the fork between his fingers without even looking. Check out his bugged-out eyes when he realizes what she’s done, combined with her matter of fact glance in his direction. It’s so perfectly in character. They can both go big when things reach a breaking point, but when they feel in control, everything is beautifully subtle and understated.

While there are some energetic action scenes that allow Parme to bounce characters across the page, I’d almost argue that his talking heads pages are his strongest. He uses every weapon in his arsenal to make those interesting. He includes background details to give the book a rich setting. He punctuates every line of dialogue with the best expressions.

And when he goes for the silhouettes – which, again, works because his characters are easily identifiable in them — you feel like he’s making a design and storytelling choice, not trying to fill in a panel quickly by obliterating all the details.

He shows everything otherwise, but he doesn’t always hold a magnifying glass up to the gag. You need to watch how he works to see everything. He’s not always going to hand it to you, but it’s always there. Do not skim through this book to read it as fast as you can. You will miss jokes that way.

He also draws some remarkable architecture. There’s a love for Venice in these pages, and Parme throws in all the details. They might look a little mechanical at times, but they work. (This book was originally published in 2001 and 2002. Parme was not using Sketch-Up.) They don’t look out of place. When Parme starts drawing insanely details buildings in the backgrounds, it’s always a moment meant to wow his audience, but it works. It keeps everything grounded and spectacular all at the same time.

It’s not all photorealistic, though. He can also create more “cartoony” backgrounds that still have all the detail. For example:

On top of it all, the colors are bright and cheerful. There’s no color keying and no special Photoshop effects, aside from some background gradients here and there. The colors represent the scene, and they are chosen well to keep all the pieces of each panel separate. Everything is super clear in this book.

The lettering from Cromatik (as usual for Europe Comics books) is bouncy and lively, just like the stories, themselves. The use of bold-faced, oversize lettering for key words gives the book a certain visual flair that I like. It’s not over-used, but mixes things up just often enough to keep them interesting.

And Then There’s a Second Story…

The interesting thing about this book you might have noticed in the credits at the top of this review is that it runs 100 pages. That’s because it’s collecting the two volumes of this series under one cover. That makes this a “Complete Collection,” since a third book never followed.

Everything I wrote in the review above relates to the first half of this book.

The second story is not as strong. Where the first one built up on itself and the craziness grew to a big crescendo, the plot in the second book just.. keeps… going. It’s a bit of a treasure hunt/scavenger hunt kind of story, and whenever you get to one dead end, the story miraculously points the way to a new dead end. Over and over.

It keeps the pages going, but it doesn’t build up enough. It introduces quirky characters who don’t do much and then get shuffled off-stage. In the first story, everything leads up to the set piece at the end where all the characters show up on stage at the same time and shifting alliances make for hilarious on-the-fly twists and turns. This second story is fun, but feels a bit more like it was made up as they went along.

It has its farcical moments — such as the repeated gag of fake deaths — but it doesn’t build up the same momentum as the first, and the two lead characters don’t snipe at each other quite so much. It’s a much friendlier story, which cuts out part of the biting humor.

It also plays more with the identity swapping and changes in relationships inherent with that so often that it starts to lose its novelty. At this point, everyone just needs to lay their cards out on there table. I’m willing to suspend disbelief, but now the series is stretching its credulity.

Unfortunately, this is the end of the series. I’d love to see a third book to wrap this up as a “Venezian trilogy.” Let the spies unmask themselves and see what the fall out is from there. Maybe it truly becomes the grand finale of the series, or maybe it creates such an interesting new dynamic that it rolls over into a new series. That, I’d like to see, too.

I doubt it’ll happen, but I do a lot of dreaming on this site….

Recommended?

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This book is a winner on every creative level. It’s the first book I’ve read this year that made me jump up and want to immediately add it to the Top 10 books I’ve read in 2020 at year’s end. It’s going to be tough to push this one off that list.

The second half is the lesser half, to be sure, but still a fun ride with some great moments of bickering between the two leads. The art doesn’t miss a beat. It’s worth paying for the entire book, though, just to get the front half. (Currently, it’s $8.49 on Izneo or $8.99 on comiXology.)

And I have to give special mention here to the translator, Jessie Aufiery. I don’t have the original French book to compare and contrast with the English language edition, but the fact that a book that relies so much on the witty verbal repartee translated so well is a testament to Aufiery’s skills to know how much to translate literally and how much to twist into English. It couldn’t have ben an easy job, but the results are wonderful.