DemocracyIs the Anti-300, and One of the Best Graphic Novels of the Year

In ancient Greece , a lowly Athenian army tries to sleep the night before a battle against Prince Xerxes and his massive Iranian horde . They are ineffectual to log Z’s , so one soldier start out to tell a tale — a report of bravery , of battle , and the terms of freedom .

Now , in Frank Miller ’s original graphical novel 300 , the soldier also babble out about mostly raw maleness fetishists who throw sub - par sister off cliffs , of ugly ( and therefore treacherous ) mutation , and monstrous extraneous hordes . But in the new graphic novel Democracy , the soldier Leander discuss watching the birth of democracy in ancient Athens , a creation that was n’t carry merely out of well intentions , but also oppressiveness , violence , political sympathies , chance and more . And despite the lack of topless prophetesses and hyperviolence , Democracy is by far the superior heroic poem .

Illustrators Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna helped make the rightly acclaimed Logicomix , which go the foundation of mod math with the personal life history of the people searching for it ; here , they do they same ( along with writer Abraham Kawa ) , but for the anguished get-go of the noblest idea of government . Here , young Leander ascertain the Athenian hoi polloi struggle under tyranny , then fight back their way out … only to diminish prey to a newfangled autocrat in the process . As Athens struggle towards republic , Leander discovers the irony that for the people to take kick , individuals must take bursting charge first — and that in order for things to get ripe , sometimes they have to get , much , much worse .

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I ’ve never read anything that so astutely , so absolutely encapsulates this paradox of human desire — the need to be free and yet to be unattackable — and how what should be the most obvious and noble of ideas often take cunning , braveness , and even bloodshed to action . But for all that Democracy wrestles with history and government and these weighty matter , the story is accessible , entertaining and personal , and full of gods , action mechanism , Romance language and more . It ’s fun , it ’s heartbreaking , it ’s persuasion - agitative , and it ’s tragical — and it ’s absolutely one of the greatest graphic novel I expect to read all year .

Papadatos , Kawa and Di Donna ’s Democracy is out today .

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