It is not very often that a graphic novel author dares to take on frontally matters of philosophical intent (Apostolos Doxiadis with his Logicomix comes to mind as a notable, recent exception), so we ought to be thankful for the brave effort in that lofty purpose that the Spanish graphic artist and storyteller Francesc Capdevila, better known as Max, has undertaken in his Conversación de sombras published in November 2013 by La Cúpula.

Max, as usual, chooses an original format for his work. A first part of the work is a strictly sequential narrative in images that takes place in a garden outside the place now known as the Villa of the Papyri, near Herculaneum, minutes before the eruption of Mount Vesubius in the year 79 AD. The second part reproduces the text of three letters, one written by the philosopher Epicurus to Maecenas and two others from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus.

The villa, discovered in 1750, housed hundreds of charred scrolls that were preserved by volcanic ash, making the collection the only extant library of antiquity.

The story begins with Max’s famous talkative and vehement birdlike character walking through ancient ruins. Naturally, his musings carry the reader to the two silhouetted figures, a young man and his older mentor, who are discussing the Epicurean ideas gathered in the library. The young man is troubled by his meeting an augur in nearby Herculaneum. And, as things go, the rest is history…

The textual quotations from Epicurus and Pliny the Younger, the first included in a biography of Epicurus by Carlos García Gual, and the other two, letters 16 and 20, from Pliny’s Book VI, add a solid conceptual and historical background to this innovative work of pictoliterature. An unforgettable delight for the reader. ( )