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CHANGERS #s 1 & 2
($8.95 ppd each within the US – overseas, please inquire – from Ezra Claytan Daniels,
www.dream-chocolate.com)
Review by Tim O'Neil
It's rare to find a debut graphic novel with as much poise, confidence and competence as you see on every page of
Changers. Compounded by the fact that Mr. Daniels is only 23 years old, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that we may be witnessing the birth of an extraordinary talent.
Changers manages the neat trick of masking its overriding ambition behind sly understatement. It’s science fiction set against the grand scale of human evolution, only played on a stage no larger than that of a small apartment building. In essence, two super-evolved humans from three-million years in the future, Bisso and Gaeza, have returned to roughly the modern day in order to serve as the catalysts to set humanity down a different evolutionary path than the one it actually achieved. The conflict occurs when someone – Oscar – comes back from the future they create, and the future his existence unwittingly illustrates is not a pleasant one. They are left with the decision to abort their mission – by committing suicide – or to go forward, knowing that the brave new world they create is quite possibly a horrendous one for humanity.
Daniels is obviously influenced by Stephen Baxter, and in particular it’s hard to ignore the parallels with Baxter’s masterful
Manifold: Time. However, it’s easy to forgive Daniels on the basis that
Changers is cut from an entirely different cloth. Science fiction is, historically, a thematically repetitive genre, with similar ideas and concepts being reused and reappraised with every subsequent generation. The fact is, by placing the high-octane sci-fi concept into an everyday, almost prosaic milieu, Daniels has created the kind of high concept dichotomy that betrays an impossibly precocious instinct for storytelling.
It would be easy, given everything that works so well about
Changers, to overlook the few problems that do exist. Although Daniels’ storytelling is strong as a rule, the sheer amount of story communicated throughout the course of almost two-hundred pages still has a tendency to overwhelm his layouts. Although his tentative, shaky line is highly sophisticated in its application, he falters occasionally on faces, particularly female faces. I would be willing to bet that Daniels was working with a smaller page size than most modern cartoonists - perhaps he needs to go up a size or two in order to allow his layouts more room to breathe. I almost get a similar feeling to early-'70s Kirby – after the industry-standard page size shrunk from 2x the finished product to a mere 1.5x and Kirby struggled to fit his layouts on the page.
His use of graytone is refreshingly sophisticated, giving the black & white pages an attractively balanced feel. His feel for dialogue, especially the clipped and awkward rhythms of everyday dialogue, is intuitive and believable. I would, however, warn against ever inserting jarringly artificial computer lettering techniques into what is otherwise an overwhelmingly attractive and authenticly hand-made narrative flow.
Conceptually, Daniels is spot-on. I’ve almost given up on ever seeing evolution handled accurately in the media – it’s one of the most misunderstood and mishandled theories in the history of fiction. Thankfully, his understanding jibes generally with this layman’s understanding. While the science is nowhere near as thick and plentiful as you would find in your average hard sci-fi novel, Daniels knows enough to give the narrative the illusion of depth without betraying any gaping inconsistencies. (Let us not forget that Stephen Baxter possesses multiple PHDs while Daniels is a self-described “art-school dropout” – considering this, the book is even more impressive an achievement.)
The book’s true strength lies in its ability to place moral ambivalence so palpably at the heart of the story without sacrificing the narrative thrust. The book is essentially about a single choice, and the entire story leads up to that choice without ever giving the reader the luxury of an easy or obvious answer. Like all the best fiction, it places the burden of proof on the reader’s conscience, leaving you to decide between a set of equally unattractive and equally dangerous options. You will be thinking about the choices made in this book for a long time after you put it down.
It’s easy to do bad science fiction. Most of what passes for sci-fi in comics these days amounts to little more than warmed-over space opera with delusions of grandeur – Buck Rogers filtered through the ubiquity of
Star Wars and
Star Trek. It's rare to see a serious attempt at the genre in American comics, and even rarer for said attempt to be an unquestionably accomplished freshman release.
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