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TERRIBLE SUNRISE #3: Hearts and Flowers
by Stan Martin
(50pp magazine, B&W, £3.00 from Steve Martin / Betsy Heavens Comics / 40 Gloucester St. / Newtown / Chester CH1 3HR / ENGLAND. Web:
www.comix.org.uk/betsyheavens/index.html)
Review by Mike Hunter
A remarkable amount of work has gone into this oversized, beautifully rendered volume. Concluding a trilogy dealing with the beginnings of what in the British Isles is called the “Great War,”
Terrible Sunrise #3 follows a confusingly large cast of characters in 1914. Some say their goodbyes, an Army recruiter sets up shop in the town square, deftly dealing with a mother “causing a scene” at her son’s wish to enlist, newspapers dispense propaganda (a reporter is instructed, “...Change ‘German Forces’ to ‘Screaming Teuton Hordes’...”), while others roll their eyes over the resulting hyperbole. A documentary-style approach gives equal emphasis to banal chatter and scattered outbreaks of drama. Melodrama briefly raises its head: upon hearing a cad – complete with pencil-thin mustache – has pawned the earrings he’d given her, the aggrieved young lady says, “How
could you?” For one accustomed to the relative wide-open spaces of America, Martin’s book gives a feel of what it must be like to be in a more thoroughly-settled country. The panels are claustrophobically crammed with people, seething with their activity and constant conversation.
One wishes that Martin would have devoted just one of the many finely-drawn but superfluous pages encasing the story (
Terrible Sunrise has what are in effect not one, but
three “front covers,” none of which is very graphically striking, plus several more pages devoted to portraits, and two superb “splash pages” - a bisected view of the crowded town square, Union Jacks and soaring birds fluttering in the breeze - which would have made far better covers) to an identifying chart of the many characters, with capsule bios and “what’s gone before” recapitulation of the plot. Even readers with access to the prior books would surely be puzzled about who’s who at times, especially since the cast’s narratives interweave, and later on, when they abruptly appear in military getup, they become even less individualized. They don’t call them “uniforms” for nothing!
Martin succeeds admirably in replicating the confused muddle of a crowd milling about, and everyday chitchat. By far my favorite part is the pastoral leavetaking of a young man and an old chap who’d employed him and was, apparently, a parental surrogate as well. The conversation is realistically choppy and devoid of stirring rhetoric, but with volumes of unexpressed emotion pulsing beneath the surface. Here the panels are larger, less cluttered with dialogue: the sequence can
breathe. (It doesn’t hurt that the scene reminds me of my favorite Norman Rockwell painting, “Breaking Home Ties,” complete with mournful dog.) Stan Martin’s approach to depicting war is original, and attests to what doubtless was considerable research: artillery barrages are timed with watches, infantry charges terminated not because the soldiers are being cut down like wheat, but when it’s
time, soldiers retreating at the bugle’s signal, as if they were workers ending their shift. Aside from that German infantry charge, the carnage is minimized and, for the most part, downplayed: A German officer tells a subordinate, “Get your section ready, Sergeant...” “All gone, sir. Well...except Muller.” The hapless Muller is shown clutching his injured belly and coughing blood. “Oh,” says the officer.
The whole is under-dramatized, no doubt a conscious decision, but creating a blandly-flavored aesthetic “meal.” A battery of cannons blazing away looks positively sedate, hovering sound effects failing to add the sense of percussive impact lacking in the artwork. Those tending the artillery seem to be performing a stately minuet. An explosive charge is set off, but with no foreshadowing of the event or prior mention of the strategic importance of the object destroyed – a small bridge – it becomes merely an unimportant incident. The blast is shown in long shot, draining as much excitement as possible. Soldiers’ dryly witty reminiscences of past wars take precedent over scenes of combat. One odd illustrative touch: large eyes make characters more appealing (a dictum taken to extreme in Manga), yet here orbs are small and squinty, barely-there, minimizing expressiveness. The book – and trilogy – comes quietly to an end with muted hints of the war to grow and engulf the continent, and an innocuous bit of slapstick.
A defensible and intelligent artistic approach, to depict war’s absurdity and banality with overheard fragments of naturalistic conversation rather than explanatory speeches, a cast of complicated individuals rather than easy-to-peg stereotypes. Without a narrator to push a viewpoint or enforce a “shape” to the proceedings, no main protagonist to identify with and be concerned for. No emotional crescendo or movingly poetic finale. But as a result, one leaves the book with a complex mixture of hard-to-identify reactions rather than satisfaction.
Terrible Sunrise shows significant talent, even if it’s hardly juicily enjoyable in the junk-food fashion of an episode of “Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos.” As Alfred Hitchcock put it, “a slice of life,” rather than – what he preferred his films to be - “a slice of
cake.”
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