Graphic Novel, “Illustrated Novel” as we call it in recent years, is increasingly seeking our attention. THE Nikos Kazantzakis could not be missing from this relatively new field. As part of the reissue of Kazantzakian works, which has long been launched by Diopters, the books of Panagiotis Pantazis “Captain Michalis” and Soloup “Zorbas. Green stone beautiful “(both in 2023), illustrating the two famous Cretan novels around the world. The series now has two volumes for life, the action and the writing career of Kazantzakis, in a script by Allain Glykos, an illustration by Antonin and a translation by Katerina Zografos: “The Cretan Gaze, 1883-1919” and “The Bustrough World, 1921-1957”.

Allen Glicos, born in 1948 of Greek descent from his father’s side, is a professor in Burgundy 1 and writer of almost twenty novels. He is also the creator of a documentary on his father, who was filmed for French and Greek television. Together with illustrator Antonen they have created two other illustrated novels.

The two books about Kazantzakis are based on a fantastic gliko conversation with him.

The reader will easily see in the first volume the source of Glicos, which is none other than the Kazantzakian “reference to Greco”. The childhood precedes in Crete, dominated by the form of the father and with numerous references to the mother figure. Following are studies in Athens and Paris, the first love and the later difficult marital life (with Galateia Kazantzakis), the Balkan Wars and World War II, the journey to Mount Athos with Sikelianos, the catalyst for the catalyst.

The guide to the second volume is largely the travel texts of Kazantzakis. We will see the charm of the Soviet Union, the heavy shadows of Lenin, Buddha and Christ, the Spanish Civil War, the landscapes of Japan and China, the successive adventures of Helen or the personality of Helen, the second wife. Before and above all, however, a screenwriter and illustrator will convey the restless spirit of Kazantzakis, his constant career to an excruciating uphill, which is also the title of his anecdotal novel by Dioptera. An uphill, who also encompasses his constant divisions along with the multitude of doubts, who even strain him when he begins to write at an early age – and already ill – his novels. And let’s take into account the psychosomatic, Freudian -type hassle, the endless pursuits for the unity of flesh and spirit, the varied ideological denials and the stubbornly single life.

If Glico gets some freedoms from his sources, never being particularly removed from their letter, Antonen uses as the basis of the drawing of the paintings, photographs and frescoes of Knossos to “embroider” his own abstract shots. Footage, which lead to autonomous artistic compositions, divided into four basically colors, dominated by red and yellow. A special place in the illustration will keep the imprinting of fears, panic and visions – in different words of artistic fantasies, as well as the author’s artistic expectations: from the joy and funeral of childhood to the time of decay and old age. And what Antonen succeeds in his design primarily is an atmosphere of charming mixing, as it does, as Kazantzakis did, the robust will with the abysmal sense of vacuum, the path to the high and the god with God.