(A review of Vols 1-4)
An interesting historical manga focusing on the youth of Eumenes, secretary to Philip of Macedon and later one of Alexander The Great's generals. He's a highly intelligent character, a planner and tactician (as he was in real life) and it's this side of him that seems to fascinate Hitoshi Iwaaki: the comic is at its best when Eumenes is thinking his way out of a difficult military situation, as in the siege of his adopted village in volumes 3 and 4.
Historie is a laconic series - Iwaaki's simple, expressive figurework is often cut free of background, and characters are sometimes outwardly impassive even in the face of brutal violence and reversals of fortune. Sometimes the impassivity infected this reader, during the comic's quieter stretches. But when the violence does come it's unsparing, and there's a tension in the comic as a whole that echoes the wariness of its lead character as he lives on his wits in a world of rigid castes and complex politics.