Review: Poseidon-T

When the artist of a pirate/erotic graphic novel decides to work solo, what do you get? Something unexpected! Franze, who’d drawn the entertaining and very explicit Black Wade a few years ago, is back at publisher Bruno Gmünder with Poseidon-T¹, which couldn’t be more different from his previous effort.

Gonzalo and his crush

Gonzalo is a young gay guy who has a big crush on a hunky, bearded rugby player (and yes, there’s a reference in the book to the Dieux du stade calendars) weirdly named Poseidon. A perfect set-up for an erotic tale, wouldn’t you say? But Franze takes a completely different route: as a match ends with Gonzalo cheering on the man of his (literal) dreams, an alien invasion begins and the world begins to end.

Tentacled monsters!

What started as a cute, possible love story has turned into a fun, if very gory, blockbuster film full of people being dissolved by red rain, turned into tentacled monsters and generally being creatively massacred. As for Gonzalo, Poseidon and a few other survivors, they try to dodge the unseen invaders, with various degrees of success. Franze introduces other characters only to have them killed one by one, leaving Gonzalo and Poseidon alone in the world, a situation that does feel like something out of Gonzalo’s fantasies, if it wasn’t for all the blood and dead people.

There are moments of peace, when the two men manage to talk or have some sleep, deepening the bond between them—Poseidon is seemingly straight, but definitely not narrow-minded, and Gonzalo is torn between the pleasure of being close to that hot man and facing the reality of the invasion. In fact, though there are only two “real” characters in this story, they’re more developed than what I’ve seen in recent, similar films (yes, I’m looking at you, Pacific Rim).

Gonzalo and Poseidon bonding

I have only two problems with the book, one serious and one far less: the dialog felt a bit wrong in place, a bit flat, and I can’t decide whether that’s the fault of the writer or of the translator; and more importantly, the behavior of the gay guy felt like a living cliché: Gonzalo is shown as very weak-willed, passive in front of the events. He looks up to Poseidon more than what would be expected of a young man being protected by a stronger guy—that, in itself, is a difference from the blockbuster films, which nowadays take some pain in showing stronger-willed women who are not subservient to the male characters. Maybe Gonzalo simply has serious Daddy issues.

As you can see from the various excerpts I’m including, Franze’s art is top-notch. Besides his solid, dynamic layout and the warm and the rich palette he employs, the artist can draw alien monstrosities, portray a calm moment or delineate the body of a hot guy with equal ease. I’m not always attracted to the more manga-influenced artists, but here, I can only applaud with both hands—since this is not a book one reads with one hand.

The story, which for a time followed the codes of the disaster/monster movie, takes a turn for the absurd when a robot right out of Mazinger appears on the scene, giving Poseidon an opportunity to save the world, by battling the main vessel of the aliens, which is shaped as a… Well, look at the illustration below!

Giant, bearded robot vs. giant, alien robot dinosaur! With tentacles!

This climax feels more than ever like an adolescent fantasy, and in fact, the author had opened his story with two statements: “All this is adolescent!” and “Everything narrated in this graphic novel is fictional.” The key to all the weirdness and nonsense is given in the ending of the book, a surprisingly realistic ending which might also explain and justify the behavior of Gonzalo I’d pointed above. The relationship between the main characters is made more touching by that ending, which I felt was completely satisfying both in an intellectual and in an emotional way.

There’s a real risk that Poseidon-T will fly under most readers’ radar because Gmünder publishes almost exclusively erotic books, and it would be a pity, since it’s a book that only looks like a glossy monster movie, but is in fact the tender character study of a young gay guy who still needs to grow up a bit.