2 out of 5

This has some cute moments, and Trondheim’s comedic writing always nails a few scenes – here mixing dialogue repartee between its leads with constant slapstick hinjnx – but Venezia ultimately very much fails to excite, coming across as something of a stalled idea, script and art-wise, making its 90-something pages often quite a chore. 

Giuseppe and Sophia are secret agents, tasked by different bosses to accomplish similar tasks, though perhaps for similar reasons. They’ve each chosen a particular guise to get close to their marks – he a painter, she a singer – and in those guises, unknowing of each’s other identities, they have bickering-couple energy, quite snippy but also sharing some traits… which is perhaps because of how well they seem to vibe together as “The Eagle” and “The Black Scorpion”, the masked or costumed personas chosen when doing the more secret parts of their work. As the two share goals, they continually run across each other, also somewhat bickering-couple, but in a more playful, “let’s see who gets to the finish line first” way. 

Given very expressive character models and a bright and lived-in renaissance Venice as a setting, artist Fabrice Parme assists in making initial positive impressions alongside the setup, their cartoonish style and the high concept making this a perfect fit for comics. We of course have movies in this vein (romcoms with assassins and whatnot), but turning this into a Beano-type adventure (or whatever the French equivalent of that is) feels unique to the format. 

But: even while the first few pages are getting things going, you can feel some churn as Trondheim tries to extend what would probably be better fitting as a weekly Sunday comic into an ongoing story. These are all thin characters – the primaries; their targets – built around one attribute a piece, and the central gag of how they interact (as enemies in their “regular” personas; friends in their spy ones; inadvertently and directly helping each other in their quests) is essentially repeated ad nauseam. 

Trondheim has a light scripting touch to keep it bouncy, and tries to add a treasure quest flair to the way the duo procures info, but it’s all just a string of macguffins for the same joke’s reiterations, and the art is rather stuck in this same loop: same characters, same cartoonish reactions, same settings. 

Totally inoffensive, but then to the point where it starts to get a bit tedious.