Books, Arts & Manners: Episode and Framed Picture

The time was bound to come. The Pope has become a comic strip hero. And like any good comic strip hero, the place he can be found is not in the Sunday funnies, but, like Superman and Charlie Brown, on stage—in this case, in Peter Luke’s Hadrian VII.

Everything is episode and framed picture: the Pope receives a jar of pickled onions; the Pope makes a fat cardinal walk with him halfway across Rome; the Pope renounces temporal sovereignty. The constant is the Pope, the caricature hero, present in every incident, except the vignettes in which his enemies scheme to get him.

RC

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Richmond Crinkley

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The time was bound to come. The Pope has become a comic strip hero. And like any good comic strip hero, the place he can be found is not in the Sunday funnies, but, like Superman and Charlie Brown, on stage—in this case, in Peter Luke’s Hadrian VII.

Everything is episode and framed picture: the Pope receives a jar of pickled onions; the Pope makes a fat cardinal walk with him halfway across Rome; the Pope renounces temporal sovereignty. The constant is the Pope, the caricature hero, present in every incident, except the vignettes in which his enemies scheme to get him.