Ostensibly a sequel to her earlier, and justly well-received,  The Song Of Aglaia, French cartoonist Anne Simon’s newly-released-in-English (and in color!) The Empress Cixtisis (originally published in 2014 under the title Cixtite Imperatrice) is something rather more than that, in actuality — I mean, yeah, Aglaia’s back and all, but she’s just one of a pair of dueling pro/antagonists, the other being our titular Empress, who is herself a barely-concealed (to say nothing of bitingly sardonic) stand-in for the “real life” Empress Dowager Cixi of China, who effectively ruled that country for nearly 50 years. We’ve got an ambitious and multi-faceted text going on here, then, but here’s the thing with Simon — no matter how conceptually and theoretical dense her work may be, it’s never anything less than a pure joy to read.

In fact, my one and only complaint about The Empress Cixtisis is that, at…