The Last Days of Pompeo

It’s the late ’80s in Italy, and Pompeo needs a fix. The young artist is in the clutches of a heroin addiction, but his day-to-day life feels almost tame: He draws, he reads, he sees friends and lovers, he feeds his rabbit, he teaches students whose names he doesn’t remember—he calls them “bud” or “pal” instead—and he runs to move his car before the tow truck takes it away. Yet he’s plunging deeper and deeper into his addiction: He sits in dank rooms waiting to score, he endures mind-numbing conversations with deadbeat dealers, and he loses himself for longer and longer stretches, becoming ever more sure that his end is near. In The Last Days of Pompeo, Andrea Pazienza, a legend of Italian underground comics, crafted a raw and haunting portrait of life in the throes of addiction—a portrait confirmed to be at least partially autobiographical when Pazienza died of a heroin overdose a year after the book’s release. Linguistically rich and stylistically various, The Last Days of Pompeo is a masterful graphic novel, with art that swerves from El Greco–like portraiture to slapstick gags, and an intricate text expertly rendered into English for the first time by Geoffrey Brock. The Last Days of Pompeo is the capstone of Pazienza’s tragically short but immensely influential comics career.