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Pompeii
Frank Santoro's latest graphic novel--his first in six years--takes place just before the eruption of Pompeii in 79 AD. The story follows Marcus, a young expat artist from Paestum who works as an assistant to Flavius, a seemingly well-regarded painter. Aside from mixing paint, Marcus is entangled in the older artist's romantic deceptions, while stuck figuring out his own. Nicole Rudick wrote of this work in "The Comics Journal": "Santoro's drawings are wonderful; his reduction of figures to tone and line and shape recall illusionistic Roman frescoes and the drawings of Giacometti and Emile Bernard, but endowed with comic-strip dynamism. But if Pompeii were just a series of clever sight lines and intriguing artwork, it would not be as satisfying [ ] the story's physical structure is married to its themes, and to be aware of one is to be more appreciative of the other."
144 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
February 2, 2016
A painter, his young apprentice, their lovers, etc. during the last days of Pompeii. Santoro's intuitive- and unfinished-looking pencils beautifully evoke a more personal, less industrious pre-modern culture and mindset. Very impressive stuff!
September 6, 2014
At first I think this is a kind of sketchbook, and a sort of rough one at that. But that's just the first impression, though it's not exactly wrong. Santoro tells a complex story of art-making and love where the art, grounded in the tragic story of Pompeii, resonates with the art of that time as well as the daily work of art-making in any time. It is not polished and computer-generated like so many glossy superhero comics; this is an artist, drawing, and storytelling with his pencil and paper of what it might have been at that time, particularly reflecting his fiction of a couple preserved together forever. Powerful stuff.
September 24, 2013
Santoro's latest features a young painter during the last days of Pompeii, apprenticing to an older master, and the romantic foibles of the two. It's drawn in a no-looking back pencil-sketch style that at times is hurried and at times is beautifully evocative. A nice read, beautifully drawn.
February 14, 2019
Santoro riesce a rendere con grande semplicità e trasporto un momento - letteralmente - cristallizzato nella storia, in cui fra vicende estremamente quotidiane il tempo si sospende - di nuovo letteralmente - per sempre. Molto evocativo.
November 20, 2024
It feels like reading the storyboards of a movie, the art alone makes this worth it. Also LETS GO ROMAN EMPIRE WOOOOH.
February 11, 2014
Hot tamale! I'm familiar with Santoro's "Comics Workbook", but I hadn't read any of his comics. The style here is such a knock-out. His characters move in manners which feel both natural and immediate, making it a total pleasure to watch them traipse through this rather short comic. The stylistic choices aren't quite so overwrought as, say, Dash Shaw's (sorry--I like his work but...), so they seem fresh and almost unselfconscious. I liked the lack of gutters between panels--there were borders only, and even those may be punctured. The blurring of styles, too, felt interesting and urgent rather than careless and rushed.
October 31, 2013
I found the story to be very moving, and it felt personal and relatable. The lovely artwork is deceptively simple, and creates a fascinating world that I was sad to leave behind.
January 8, 2021
Having recently read and loved Frank Santoro’s latest book, Pittsburgh, I decided to check out one of his earlier books. At first glance, his book Pompeii is set in a very different time and place from Pittsburgh, but on closer inspection, this earlier book is every bit as personal and melancholic despite its seemingly distant setting.
Following the final days of an apprentice to a master painter (Santoro himself also spent time as the assistant to a prominent artist), the book is about the disillusionment of artistic aspiration. The destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius is merely the (admittedly very dramatic) backdrop to the pressures, anxieties, and disappointments that the artist’s young apprentice experiences.
Santoro’s visual style is incredible. His images have the look of an artist’s figure sketches combined with storyboard-like stage directions. The book also supposedly (according to Santoro) employs classical rules of aesthetic proportion. The overall impact is that the book feels very old and very new at the same time.
Who knows if Frank Santoro might have been (or might yet be) a great painter, but in the meantime, we’re all better off for his “detour” into cartooning.
Following the final days of an apprentice to a master painter (Santoro himself also spent time as the assistant to a prominent artist), the book is about the disillusionment of artistic aspiration. The destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius is merely the (admittedly very dramatic) backdrop to the pressures, anxieties, and disappointments that the artist’s young apprentice experiences.
Santoro’s visual style is incredible. His images have the look of an artist’s figure sketches combined with storyboard-like stage directions. The book also supposedly (according to Santoro) employs classical rules of aesthetic proportion. The overall impact is that the book feels very old and very new at the same time.
Who knows if Frank Santoro might have been (or might yet be) a great painter, but in the meantime, we’re all better off for his “detour” into cartooning.
June 4, 2023
A painter's apprentice mulls over his life working for his master and his relationship with his lover in the days leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It's funny, heartwarming and gut-wrenching all at once, with some loose, sketchy artwork by Frank Santoro. The art style may not work for everyone, but I appreciated how economical and easy to follow the story was. Santoro achieves a lot of story with a short page count due to his expressive art style and crisp dialogue. An splendid comic indeed.
January 6, 2024
Storia d’amore e d’arte (come dice la quarta di copertina) prima e durante l’eruzione del Vesuvio del 79 D.C., questo è un libro strano. La storia è carina, mentre i disegni sono al limite del bambinesco e del surrealmente infantile. Scelta dell’autore? Probabilmente sì. In questo caso, però, i disegni sono solo di contorno alla storia, la cui conclusione è scontata, ma non lo è affatto il modo in cui la vicenda si conclude, ed i più acculturati sui ritrovamenti pompeiani capiranno subito vedendo l’ultima figura.
May 6, 2020
The art looks like a rough sketch, which is an interesting stylistic choice, but also annoying to look at. Even worse is the hand-written words which can be hard to decipher.
This style is not to my taste. The story is okay though.
This style is not to my taste. The story is okay though.
July 17, 2022
The sketches tell the story of Pompeii shortly before the famous eruption beautifully. The storyline did not pull me in at the beginning but the ending truly fostered my imagination about life on the brink of death.
October 14, 2023
The story felt straightforward in the best way, but tied into deeper stories and histories that I know just a little about. I'll read it at least a few more times and I'm sure I'll notice something new.
July 29, 2023
Despite knowing the overall context of the demise of Pompeii, the story dives you in and lets you feel how strong the characters do.
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February 14, 2025Really liked this. If only things could have been different for him to write a Pompeii-ii
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July 8, 2014[Note: a version of this review appears, in German, in the Swiss comics journal STRAPAZIN.]
“Cartoonist” is one name for a maker of comics, but the origin of the word is surprising. In medieval Italy “cartone” was stiff paper used for rough preparatory drawings for frescoes or paintings. Loose, dynamic sketches, by which a classical artist works out tableaux with emotion and dramatic tension—that perfectly describes Frank Santoro’s style in his latest graphic novel, POMPEII. And the style is a fitting one, since the book’s protagonists are themselves early Italian painters who would have employed “cartoons” for their work.
POMPEII takes place in AD 79 in the city of the same name, under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of classical history knows how this story will turn out. Flavius, a “mid-career artist,” is looking for his breakthrough. Marcus, a young apprentice to Flavius, is mostly driven by the desire not to return to his provincial hometown of Paestum, where career options are limited. Lucia, Marcus’s girlfriend, loves him but can’t wait to start a family. Unknown to his wife, Alba, Flavius is having an affair with an unnamed Princess, whose portrait he is painting, though it’s not clear whether Flavius’s attraction to the Princess is genuine: her father has access to moneyed patrons in Rome.
Frank Santoro is (or should be) best known for his astonishing STOREYVILLE, an impressionistic/expressionistic Bildungsroman first published in 1995. Distribution was limited, “art comics” had not yet really caught on in the United States, and as a result too few readers experienced what was truly a revolution in the comics form. I can say without exaggeration that STOREYVILLE changed how I thought about the potential of comics. (No less a personage than Chris Ware had the exact same sentiments about the book, captured in his Introduction to the Picturebox reissue of STOREYVILLE: “I consider reading STOREYVILLE for the first time one of the touchstones of my life as a cartoonist, and the book itself one of the landmarks of comics’ development.”)
In POMPEII, Santoro revisits many themes from STOREYVILLE, but twenty years later and from the perspective of a mature cartoonist—indeed, it’s tempting to read Flavius and Marcus as dual self-portraits of the artist, young and old. The interests in POMPEII are both formal and emotional. Formally, the book is a masterpiece of comics storytelling: while the sepia-toned pencil and wash drawings are loose and open (like “cartoons” for a fresco), the compositions balance confidence and experimentation; demonstrate a crisp intellectual engagement with the challenges of graphic narrative; and make use of classical principles such as symmetry and the golden mean. (It is worth noting that Santoro spends a good bit of his time teaching comics.) But it is emotion that truly animates POMPEII, as Santoro explores timeless ideas: love, sex, art, and business; youthful innocence and jaded experience; seeing and blindness; romance and responsibility; the ambition of the artist versus the problems and squabbles of everyday life; the fleeting and the eternal; nature and artifice; life and death.
A decade or two before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Latin writer Seneca reminded his readers of an ancient Greek aphorism: life is short, but great art is eternal, and great artists require a lifetime to master their art. “Ars longa, vita brevis.” With wisdom, beauty, and a gentle sadness, Santoro’s POMPEII captures those sentiments perfectly: Marcus and Lucia will be frozen forever in their youthful love and happiness, on the page and in our minds, while Santoro himself clearly remains committed to pushing the art of cartooning forward.
“Cartoonist” is one name for a maker of comics, but the origin of the word is surprising. In medieval Italy “cartone” was stiff paper used for rough preparatory drawings for frescoes or paintings. Loose, dynamic sketches, by which a classical artist works out tableaux with emotion and dramatic tension—that perfectly describes Frank Santoro’s style in his latest graphic novel, POMPEII. And the style is a fitting one, since the book’s protagonists are themselves early Italian painters who would have employed “cartoons” for their work.
POMPEII takes place in AD 79 in the city of the same name, under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of classical history knows how this story will turn out. Flavius, a “mid-career artist,” is looking for his breakthrough. Marcus, a young apprentice to Flavius, is mostly driven by the desire not to return to his provincial hometown of Paestum, where career options are limited. Lucia, Marcus’s girlfriend, loves him but can’t wait to start a family. Unknown to his wife, Alba, Flavius is having an affair with an unnamed Princess, whose portrait he is painting, though it’s not clear whether Flavius’s attraction to the Princess is genuine: her father has access to moneyed patrons in Rome.
Frank Santoro is (or should be) best known for his astonishing STOREYVILLE, an impressionistic/expressionistic Bildungsroman first published in 1995. Distribution was limited, “art comics” had not yet really caught on in the United States, and as a result too few readers experienced what was truly a revolution in the comics form. I can say without exaggeration that STOREYVILLE changed how I thought about the potential of comics. (No less a personage than Chris Ware had the exact same sentiments about the book, captured in his Introduction to the Picturebox reissue of STOREYVILLE: “I consider reading STOREYVILLE for the first time one of the touchstones of my life as a cartoonist, and the book itself one of the landmarks of comics’ development.”)
In POMPEII, Santoro revisits many themes from STOREYVILLE, but twenty years later and from the perspective of a mature cartoonist—indeed, it’s tempting to read Flavius and Marcus as dual self-portraits of the artist, young and old. The interests in POMPEII are both formal and emotional. Formally, the book is a masterpiece of comics storytelling: while the sepia-toned pencil and wash drawings are loose and open (like “cartoons” for a fresco), the compositions balance confidence and experimentation; demonstrate a crisp intellectual engagement with the challenges of graphic narrative; and make use of classical principles such as symmetry and the golden mean. (It is worth noting that Santoro spends a good bit of his time teaching comics.) But it is emotion that truly animates POMPEII, as Santoro explores timeless ideas: love, sex, art, and business; youthful innocence and jaded experience; seeing and blindness; romance and responsibility; the ambition of the artist versus the problems and squabbles of everyday life; the fleeting and the eternal; nature and artifice; life and death.
A decade or two before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Latin writer Seneca reminded his readers of an ancient Greek aphorism: life is short, but great art is eternal, and great artists require a lifetime to master their art. “Ars longa, vita brevis.” With wisdom, beauty, and a gentle sadness, Santoro’s POMPEII captures those sentiments perfectly: Marcus and Lucia will be frozen forever in their youthful love and happiness, on the page and in our minds, while Santoro himself clearly remains committed to pushing the art of cartooning forward.
July 2, 2015
I knew this was going to be sad. I mean, it's about Pompeii - that's the whole reason I checked it out. Because I know what happens historically. The story was really good, and completely believable if you know much about Ancient Greece. A painter is having an affair with a Princess. His assistant is having problems with his girlfriend. Princess tries to get the painter, Flavius and his lady, Alba to Rome's safey - leaving Marcus high and dry. The way he tries to distract Lucia is so sweet. You'll get to the end and your heart might be broken with how much love these 2 characters obviously have for each other.
December 10, 2020
Reads like a dream. The simple grid structure that holds an open center on the pages combined with Santoro's cartoony realism offers a deceptively breezy reading experience with warmth. The spreads work as well as the pages. This is a beautiful piece of comics craftsmanship that is a testament to pencils being the final art in comics. It is a triumph in comics lyricism and grid formalism.
Storywise, I always know what's coming (we all do), but it always hits me like a ton of bricks.
I'm in tears every time.
Storywise, I always know what's coming (we all do), but it always hits me like a ton of bricks.
I'm in tears every time.
April 10, 2015
A book that stayed with me after I finished it and that still comes to mind now and then (a sign of good fiction). The sketchy drawing style has an immediacy to it appropriate for a tale of a doomed city, and yet it doesn't feel at all obvious--because it also speaks of the enduring power of art, the desire to "make a mark," not to be forgotten.
September 11, 2013
Santoro has an assured line. Even with story of Pompeii's last days told in a sketchbook style, rushed and suggestive rather than fully filled in, Santoro's drawing is good. The storyline, however, is hackneyed: a double romance during days of decline, in which the rich escape and the poor perish.
March 2, 2014
A modest effort here. Santoro's drawings are sketches in the best sense of the word, full of energy and immediacy, and connect nicely with the books overall themes of impermanxy, immortality, and destruction. The storyline and characters are a bit trite, though.
December 6, 2014
Must have been on a tight schedule top get this published as it all feels incomplete. the art work is extremely sketch-y and he's obviously never heard of a letterer or inker. The story line is mediocre.
August 10, 2016
the figure-work is astonishing, cartoon expressionism, cast in that interzone between sketch & finished art, where dynamism thrives.
Read
September 9, 2016Sweet, sketchy story of a painter's assistant in the days before Vesuvius erupts.
The art is very rough and unfinished, but it grows on you.
The art is very rough and unfinished, but it grows on you.
March 13, 2014
The narrative is simple, and yet effective. A short, lovely story showing us we humans haven't changed in the slightest.
February 28, 2015
Such simple gestures and such a full portrait.
March 13, 2015
love spank fantoro!
June 16, 2014
Very appealing. Goes well with Rob Brydon's Pompeii scene in The Trip to Italy.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews