Julius is a book of mixed feelings for me. I'm a big fan of blood-soaked crime epics, but not much of a fan of Shakespeare. I'm also a big fan of Antony Johnston's writing, although generally not so much a fan of Weldele's artwork. The resulting book is a pretty good blend of its genre influences, but some of my personal biases against the subject matter and a pretty significant failure on the part of the creative team to really bring the large cast to life results in a somewhat unsatisfying read on some levels. However, on other levels, Julius is a very engaging read, a tale of greed and jealousy giving way to one murder which gives way to a full-on bloodbath, and it's a good modern-day reinterpretation of the themes of Julius Caesar and a powerful look at the cycle of revenge.
I've read Julius Caesar and seen it performed, but I honestly remember only the sketchiest of details about the work. I suspect that those who really enjoyed the play, or who like Shakespeare in general, will be much more interested in Julius, because even with my somewhat vague knowledge I could get a lot of the parallels that Johnston was developing. The names of the characters map pretty closely to their Shakespeare counterparts without seeming dated or out of place (I particularly like Cassidy for Brutus Cassius), and I love that Julius's affected speech, mimicking the stylized language of Shakespeare, is pointed out by his friends as a strange occurrence, so that it doubles as a characterization touch and a nod to the original source material.
Unfortunately, while I can pick up on the characters and setting and how they relate to Julius Caesar, in some regards it feels like Johnston didn't do enough to establish them on their own terms. Much is made of the companies and the guv'nors, but the realities of this situation are kept more vague so that they'll map more clearly onto the Caesar story. One gets the sense that this is a sort of "boss of bosses" Mafia thing, but it's never spelled out as clearly as I'd like. More importantly, though, is that once Julius dies, the most interesting and best developed character is gone. The rest of the group is too similar in their thoughts and actions for me, and I never did get a handle on who all of them were, leaving the bloody rampage at the end somewhat disconnected from me. I didn't care about the characters because I had a hard time figuring out who was who, and so what might well have been poetic or ironic deaths became "oh, look, another character's gotten himself topped."
I lay the blame for this character confusion at the feet of both creators, but I put it more squarely on Weldele's shoulders. Weldele has a sketchy, minimalist style not unlike that of Andi Watson or Ted Naifeh, but I've rarely been able to connect with Weldele's work for some reason. Where Watson can distinguish a character with just a few lines, Weldele's characters all tend to look very similar, and when they're all wearing similar hairstyles and clothing, it's even more difficult to figure out who everyone is. To be fair, these characters should have a certain stylistic similarity, and making them stand out while making them realistic would be difficult for any artist, but unfortunately, for me, Weldele wasn't up to the task.
However, while I didn't like specific aspects of Julius, the overall themes of greed and ambition and the ruin that they can bring rings as true today as it did in Shakespeare's time. I didn't connect with the characters, but I did connect with the plot, and Johnston's depiction of organized crime descending from meetings and relatively friendly professionalism into all-out war is very affecting. It's just that the character confusion and my general disinterest in the artwork led me to view it from something of an emotionally detached distance, which robbed it of a fair amount of its power.
