Historie, by Hitoshi Iwaaki of Parasyte, began in Afternoon on 25 January 2003 and is still running. Its lead is the historical Eumenes, secretary to Philip II of Macedon and then to his son Alexander. He reached that position without being Macedonian, and the surviving record of how is thin, which is the gap the manga fills.
Eumenes grows up as the son of a wealthy household in a city on the Black Sea, then loses everything when the truth about his birth comes out and he is enslaved. The pleasure of the book is observation rather than battle. Eumenes does not overturn situations by force; he reads what people want to believe and changes the terms accordingly. How a king’s order distorts by the time it reaches an actual soldier, and how documents and contracts function as weapons, are both drawn concretely.
The serial moves slowly and is a long way from finished, but what exists is already enough to follow one man’s political instinct as it forms.
