Petra Chérie
Cartoonist: Attilio Micheluzzi
Translator: Jamie Richards
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: December 2025
The central heart of any good spy story is a damn well founded con. It is certainly the nature of figures whose existence is based around lying to get what you want, killing those who get in your way, and other acts of skullduggery. To remove this element of the spy story is to sand it down to nothing more than a blunt instrument that thumps its way towards a resolution.
It is this element of narrative that animates the entirety of Petra Chére. The titular Petra, working her way throughout the First World War as, to quote the book’s blurb, “a spy working for no one,” is the quintessential example of a con artist spy. She deftly works around the various sides of the war, making friends and enemies in the process. And through it all, she remains charming.
Indeed, the majority of Attilio Micheluzzi’s work within Petra Chére is charming as all get out. The colors by Agnese Micheluzzi create a warm, at times breezy atmosphere, which in turn allows their removal within the final stories to create a stark coldness to match their bleak resolution. The sound effects have a pop art quality in their boldness and size, coupled with the small panels that emphasize the aforementioned size. Micheluzzi’s character designs have a quality to them comparable to David Lloyd: at once cartoonish and harshly realistic, even implementing Lloyd’s signature usage of implied lines. But Micheluzzi is nevertheless his own artist, creating stark contrasts with characters and the world they live in.
For example, one thrilling sequence involves two men fighting atop a moving train. While utilizing a rather straightforward eight panel grid, Micheluzzi blocks the panels themselves with a rather off kilter structure. Characters are never shown within the panels as full figures, often primarily occupying corners of the rectangles, leaving the majority of the panel empty. This has the startling effect of leaving the reader off kilter while witnessing the fight, adding to the thrilling elements therein.
It is worth noting that the book is very much a product of the 70s. That is to say that there are some rather questionable characterizations regarding Nung, a recuring Chinese character. While not as egregious as, say contemporaneous works like The Castle of Fu Manchu, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, or the David Carradine vehicle Kung Fu, the character nevertheless reeks of the orientalist fervor that lingers to this day. (To say nothing of the other orientalist elements within the back third of the book.)
Still, Petra Chérie is a delight of 70s Italian comics well worth revisiting for the first time fully collected in English.
Petra Chérie is available now via Fantagraphics
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