At some time in pre-history, the great and all-powerful civilization of Atlantis, it is said, drowned under supreme oceanic waves, it’s culture and wisdom, lost to all, forever.
Truth or fiction, that wasn’t the fate of Atlantis in every universe or medium.
Whether it has found its way in books, film, television, visual arts, music, video games or comic books, the idea of Atlantis, that great and vanished city of humanity’s wisest and long-lost ancestors, has always been fertile ground for storytelling.
From Plato’s dialogues to the unfortunate, if fantastically entertaining, cultural advancement of pseudoscience here in the early part of the twenty-first century, the idea of Atlantis endures!
Even in humanity’s darkest hours, the Nazi German concentration camps of the second World War, Atlantis prevailed as both allegory and setting. Which brings us to today, and the fascinating origins and graphic novel release of the historic and timely, Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis.
Written by Dave Maass and illustrated by Patrick Lay and published by Dark Horse Comics, the 128-page hardcover of Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis is a dystopian fantasy based on the unpublished, and near-lost, one-act opera titled Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verwiegerung (The Emperor Of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death) by composer Viktor Ullmann and poet/artist Peter Kien. Incredibly, both men were imprisoned inside the Nazi concentration camp of Thereslenstadt in 1943 where they continued, amidst the hopeless inhumanity of their captors, to dedicate themselves to art and culture, writing the opera together.
Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis tells the story of an alternate universe Atlantis that never sank and its power-mad and buffoonish Emperor who declares war on everyone and everything – where everyone, man, woman and child, is against everyone else! Death itself is a main protagonist in the story, and, at the sight of the Emperor-decreed farce, declares itself on strike, leaving the advanced civilization of Atlantis a chaotic land of war and murder – where there is no dying.
Where then, amidst the shambling bodies of those alive and those that are zombies, amongst all of the prevailing fear, mistrust and hatred, is the spirit of life and love?
As an added bonus, Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis H/C contains designs from the original opera along with photographs, essays and more, illuminating the history of the piece, its composers and the dark time in which it was created.
In 1944, The Nazis, seeing the story as a mocking commentary on Adolf Hitler, did not allow the opera to be performed. Ullman and Kien were moved to Auschwitz where they were both murdered by their captors. The opera manuscript had been entrusted to others who survived the concentration camp experience, the important allegory surviving to a modern, if no less uncivilized, age.
The first performance of Der Kaiser von Atlantis was in the 1970s, but Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis H/C is its first telling as a harrowing and timely, graphic novel.
Experience the ongoing history of mankind in all of its sordid and telling detail. Make the run to your local comic book shop today and pick up the moving and provocative Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis H/C.
You can catch a sneak preview of Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis H/C right here.
