Berlin comic “Hypericum”: From Kunsthaus Tacheles to the Valley of the Kings

It was so long ago that it almost defies the temporal imagination. The Egyptian child pharaoh Tutankhamun lived and reigned more than 3000 years ago and died in 1323 BC at the age of just 19. The special thing about his story is that his tomb, including the sarcophagus and gold treasures, remained undiscovered for several millennia, until 1922 when British archaeologist Howard Carter came across it in Egypt.

Comic artist Manuele Fior processes the historical material in his new graphic novel “Hypericum” (from the Italian by Myriam Alfano, avant, 144 p., 29 €) and links the discovery of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber with Berlin in the 1990s.

The sensational grave find, which triggered a hype at the time, also inspires young Teresa, who works as a research assistant at a large Tutankhamun exhibition. The two storylines run parallel, and there are always wonderful points of contact between the two.

Complicated relationship

Fior is familiar with the procedure: Already in his graphic novel “Ikarus”, which takes place both in modern times and in ancient Greece, he relates different time levels to each other.

Manuele Fior has felt a connection to Berlin since the turn of the millennium: he worked in the city as an architect from 2000 to 2004, created his first lengthy story “Menschen am Sonntag” and has since returned here again and again, which is also reflected in other works.

The Italian Teresa has just arrived in Berlin. When she meets the Italian artist Ruben right at the beginning, a love story develops between the two. But the relationship between the determined, successful Teresa and the aimless Ruben is not without complications.

In addition, Teresa is plagued by insomnia. Ruben then offers her a remedy that should help her: Hypericum, also known as St. John’s wort. She declines, only later does the fascinating connection to ancient Egypt become clear to her.

This is exactly where Fior keeps putting his story. In the Valley of the Kings, Carter and his helpers uncover level after level, they are about to stumble upon the sensational find. Carter finally gets his first glimpse of all the gold treasures through a hole in the wall. The excitement of what is to be expected is palpable.

The drawings and the coloring also contribute to the atmosphere. The Italian comic artist is already known for his expressive picture stories. In “Hypericum” the colors are duller than in earlier works, but an amazing vibrancy is created.

World history in secret

The shimmering heat and the desert-like landscape characterize Fior in an atmospherically dense manner with soft transitions and warm earth tones that sketchily play around the site of the excavations.

In the Berlin scenes, the outlines are clearer and the spatial design more angular, but here, too, Fior repeatedly breaks through the contours. The variety of colors is far greater than in the barren landscape of sand and boulders.

What is particularly impressive is how artfully Fior allows the Berlin of the post-reunification period with the newly emerging club scene, the squats and the Kunsthaus Tacheles on the one hand and the far-ago events in the Valley of the Kings on the other hand not only to exist side by side, but also to coexist and skillfully flow into one another. The whole dramaturgy of the story has a special aesthetic.

He succeeds above all in the interplay of image and text. For example, there are a few lines from Carter’s diary above the pictures from the opening of the exhibition in Berlin. It raises doubts about his advance into the thousand-year-old burial chamber. It raises the question of the legitimacy of public display of things that should actually remain hidden.

An idiosyncratic contrast also arises when Teresa Ruben tells of how Tutankhamun’s tomb survived the Roman Empire, the emergence of world religions or the discovery of America in a Berlin club. “An eternity in dark silence” is written above a picture that shows people dancing in a packed hall. It shows how the course of world history is changing.

The passage and meaning of time are omnipresent in the graphic novel. In clever, philosophical thoughts, Fior repeatedly takes up the theme, pointing to something that lies outside of the plot: that nothing stays the same, that every time has an end. Towards the end, this also indicates an unexpected historical event that will steer the development of contemporary history in a new direction.