Casanova (comic series)

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Casanova is a creator-owned comic book by writer Matt Fraction and artist Gabriel Ba. Published by Image Comics, it premiered in July 2006 in the Slimline format of 16 pages of story per issue, sold at the reduced price of $1.99. The series centers upon renowned thief Casanova Quinn, who gets "blackmailed into being a pawn and double agent in a global game of super-espionage". It borrows heavily from Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories with a cascade of alternate universes and polymorphic sexuality.

A collection of the first seven issues is scheduled to be published in March as Casanova Volume 1: Luxuria. Fraction has stated that he hopes for seven collections, each subtitled with the Latin word for one of the seven deadly sins, in the following order: LUXURIA, GULA, AVARITA, ACEDIA, IRA, INVIDIA, and SUPERBIA. ^[1]

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

At the beginning of the first issue, Casanova "Cass" Quinn works as a freelance thief and espionage artist who has turned his back on the rest of the Quinn family. His father, Cornelius, runs the world-spanning spy organization E.M.P.I.R.E. of which Casanova's twin sister Zephyr is a top agent, while his mother Anna has been hidden away in a vegetative state for unknown reasons. Casanova is the black sheep in the family and only makes contact with his father when his sister is killed during a mission - they meet again and fight at her funeral.

The funeral is actually a turning point for Casanova's life as a mystery device his planted on him without his knowledge, a device which thrusts him bodily into the inner sanctum of Newman Xeno -- a bandaged super-genius hedonist running an evil organization called W.A.S.T.E. (a reference to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49). This Xeno, however, reveals that Casanova's actually been transplanted into a parallel timeline - moving from Timeline 909 to Timeline 919 - where Casanova was the dead E.M.P.I.R.E. agent and the very much alive Zephyr is the bad girl thief working for W.A.S.T.E. The morally ambivalent Casanova is drawn into a deceitful game where he appears as his own dead counterpart to work both sides of the W.A.S.T.E./E.M.P.I.R.E. coin.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Speculation

On October 15, 2006, Fraction was interviewed on the comic podcast Around Comics. During the interview, the subject of the 2006 World Series of Baseball was brought up; Fraction stated that, "If in fact God is dead, and the Cardinals make it to the World Series, and God remains dead, and the Cardinals WIN the World Series, I am going to level St. Louis." Fraction goes on to say that St. Louis could become something like a "Kenny" in Casanova, referring to the famed cartoon characer from the Comedy Central show South Park who is traditionally "killed off" every episode.

Considering that the St. Louis Cardinals did in fact win the World Series, it could be a possibility that a "destruction of St. Louis storyline/storylines" is on the horizon for Casanova.