The Italian Manuele Fior established himself internationally thanks to the publication of the emotional Five thousand kilometers per second, which in 2011 received the prize for best work at the Angoulême festival. In that graphic novel, some of the characteristics that define Fior's style were clear: delicate stories, told with pause and sensitivity, starring magnificently characterized characters. There it was also clear his enormous talent as a draftsman and watercolourist, which he later ratified with Celestia, a dystopian fable about two young people who want to transform the world.
Now, Manuele Fior returns to his most realistic facet to narrate a story of just 140 pages where his ability to create love stories far from the conventional shines again. In Hypericon (Salamandra Graphic, with translation by Regina López Muñoz) she offers a new storytelling lesson by combining two temporal threads that, added together, allow us to understand the nuances of the personality of young Teresa, a girl whose life follows a perfectly marked path. Until everything changes.
Hypericon is the story of a double discovery. On the one hand, that of the tomb of Tutankhamen by the Egyptologist Howard Carter, in 1922. On the other, the discovery of love by the young Teresa after meeting Ruben in the bustling Berlin of the 1990s. Teresa has arrived in Germany thanks to a scholarship to work on a major exhibition about the discovery of the tomb of the famous pharaoh. Past and present mix. Manuele Fior skilfully alternates these two spaces and these two moments so that Teresa's story gains nuances.
To all this we must add the beauty and elegance of Fior's drawing on these pages painted with warm colors. The first works of the Italian artist were done with watercolor but little by little he chose to incorporate gouache into his pages, as in Hypericon, since this allows him to play with several layers of color. Earthy colors star in these pages, which become brighter –with a radiant blue– when they portray the Valley of the Kings at the beginning of the 20th century and darker –combined with gray– when they evoke the streets of Berlin. In Manuele Fior's comic books, color is one more protagonist of the story.
