Angelica

The story of Brother Bernard, a fifteenth-century friar who has been sent on a mission to a valley bordering the Ottoman Empire to find an herbal remedy rumored to cure the bubonic plague. While the friar stays as a guest in the castle of the local lord, he becomes entangled in the family intrigues and learns of a female ghost who haunts the castle. When Bernard intervenes, he is caught in a struggle, not only for his life, but also for his soul’s redemption.

The story was inspired by a pair of parallel folk tales—the Romanian ballad of the architect of the Monastery at Arges, Master Manole, and the Hungarian legend of Kelemen, the stonemason who built the castle at Deva, of which only a ruin remains today. Both of these legends tell of a location that could not be built upon until a woman was sacrificed by being immured in the walls of the building. But why do these legends indicate that such a sacrifice is necessary? In Manole’s legend, the prince insists that the architect build on the site of an ancient, ruined wall that was already haunted. Why? What made that old wall so accursed that it would require such a sacrifice to build upon it? What cultural shifts might these rituals symbolize? What do we sacrifice today to build the structures of our contemporary culture.

Intrigued by these questions, author/illustrator Craig Coss responds to them through this penciled graphic novel. Part ghost story and part detective story, part historical fiction and part fairy tale, Angelica tells a story of a simple man’s quest for beauty, healing, and wholeness that pulls him into the darkness concealed, not only in his own unconscious psyche, but in the foundations of today’s Western civilization.