< comics/x >
DEATH SWAMP
($21.50 ppd from Toby Craig / 116 Natures Way / Huntsville, TX 77340 USA. Web:
www.ithinkican.com)
Review by Scott Hsu-Storaker
The swish of a beaded curtain, a shadow moving across a screen, the whisper of waves on a distant beach. These are some of the impressions I was left with after reading Toby Craig's
Death Swamp for the third time and I choose them for a reason, which I will get to in a little bit. I first read through this book with the intention of trying to make sense of it in the way I would with any other book. That is, I tried to read it as a linear narrative. You know, a story with a beginning, middle and end; an introduction, plot, climax and denouement like we learned in school. But the book confounded me at every turn – it just doesn't make sense that way. In fact, some pages felt like they were bound within the book in the entirely wrong order, feeling like a puzzle that needs to be pieced back together.
For the sake of completeness, though, I will give a short plot summary, but to get into too much detail would remove some of the power that this book holds over the new reader. A young boy travels through a dreamscape populated by manifestations of his many fears and anxieties, not the least of which seems to me to be the fear of growing up. He is accompanied by a guide, dubious at best, which takes the form of a cuddly bear. Craig suggests that the bear is something more than what is plainly visible, though, by drawing the bear in clean black outlines while placing a light gray wash behind or within the bear that belies something more sinister. It is this odd ghostlike, pointy-eared aura that follows him throughout much of the story, until a decisive moment near the end. The two travel through the dreamscape, exploring the back alleys of the unconscious mind, drifting through other people's dreams, and even taking on the identities of other personas by hiding behind floating masks. The story has a resolution that has something to do with a hooded figure in a tower and an odd sort of amalgamation of characters. Most of the story is rendered in subtle gray tones with crisp black lines on top that create a unique impression of the world being perfectly clear and absolutely unfocussed all at the same time. But, I won't go into many more plot details because I am truly convinced that the plot is not really the point here. At one point in the story, a teacher/mystic/guide that, for lack of a better name, I will call The Rabbit Weaver gives a bit of advice to the young boy. He says "It is about finding your way. The art is about the journey, not the end." It's almost as if Craig were talking to himself, reminding himself of his purpose and, hence, laying a clue for the readers to do the same. There's no need, really, to tell how the story ends. There is something deeper and less obvious at work here than just the twists and turns of the plot.
The second time that I read through the book I tried reading the story with an analytical mind. I'm no Psychology 101 student, mind you, but a story about exploring the recesses of the unconscious mind is ripe for being analyzed in an academic fashion. Craig even sets the reader up to think that this is the case by interspersing the narrative with intermittent pages that resemble encyclopedia entries describing the meaning of various symbols used throughout the book. Again, as with my first time through the book, I was confounded at making sense of it in a traditional way. The pastiche of ideas did not, for me at least, hold together in a logical, formal, academic way. Maybe the psych grad students out there can tell me what's up, but I left feeling at the end of this that Craig was really just throwing up red herrings in an effort to get us to keep the conscious, analytical parts of our minds busy working on solving the puzzle while gently, inexorably pushing the subtler imagery to the backs of our brains.
Which brings me to where I started this review and where I ended after I read the book through for the third time. I find myself again and again calling up images from the pages of the book, most of them just partially visible – some even have sound and movement associated with them. The one that comes to mind the most often for me is a picture of a glass blower, his face covered with a cloth that is being blown back by the heat blast from a furnace. The book, to me, has become an impressionistic exploration through the mind of the artist and his characters. This, I think, is where he was trying to take us, even if he may not realize it himself. This story works best when recalled after a few days, when the devious little images come slowly bubbling to the surface. It's kind of like a nightmare half-remembered. The sequence of events may drift away, but the chill and dread still hold you in their grip.
This book is a hard read, granted, but once you fall deep into it, you will come out with something that will stick with you. Don't say I didn't warn you when I say that you may not be able to push this book aside from your memory even long after you've tucked it away on your shelf.
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< comics/x >
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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