COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
STEVE TOASE PRESENTS HIS LATEST PICKS FROM THE WORLD OF SEQUENTIAL ART
The Curie Society MIT Press, 2021 PB, pp168, £13.99, ISBN 978-0262539944
Three young students arrive at university and find themselves recruited into a secret society. This isn’t unusual as a storyline. What makes The Curie Society different is that it places the role of women in science at the heart of its storytelling. All three of the main characters are well written and distinctive, with clear strengths and identities. While the science is a main focus of the book, the way it is incorporated helps carry the story along rather than slow it down. Throughout, The Curie Society emphasises the role of women in a huge range of stem subjects, introducing cutting edge science, and delivering the whole package in an entertaining way. This is strong storytelling first and foremost, tough, with a golden thread of science running through it. This is enhanced by the final section of the book with short bios of leading women scientists and capsule descriptions of the concepts introduced throughout. Highly recommended.
Vicious Creatures
Sarah Gordon www.gumroad.com/sarahgordon
Pb, pp250, £16 / Digital, pp250, £10
A book drawn with ink from a burnt wicker owl? How could we resist?
Vicious Creatures is a gorgeous piece of art. From cover to cover, Sarah Gordon’s collection is full of strikingly visceral images, many with the quality of woodcuts (especially the title pages and the beautiful fire-andhare themed endpiece). This is a comic, not an art book, though; so is the storytelling strong enough to support the artwork? I’m very happy to say that it is. Each of the tales is distinctive, fresh and yet has a classic feel. Horror stories unfold in London streets and on Salisbury Plain; there are hares and drummers, witches and owls.
Sarah Gordon has a real talent for using the page to make the artwork dynamic. Blank pages are used to pause the story, like a rest between movements in a symphony, and splash pages are used to reach a psychedelic cacophony. In some ways her work reminds me of Emily Carroll. Their styles are different, but they both harness the gothic to tell new stories. My personal favourites here are probably ‘Sweetness’ and ‘The Salisbury Owl’, but it really is hard to narrow it down to just two. A beautiful book that you really need in your collection.
Thistlebone TC Eglington, Simon Davis Rebellion Publishing, 2021 Hb, pp64, £12.99, ISBN 9781781087787
2000AD is best known for its sci-fi comics, but over the years it has featured several horror and related stories. Thistlebone is an excellent example. Twenty years after dramatically escaping a cult led by Jasper Hillman, Avril returns to the village of Harrowvale with writer Seema, and an incredibly unsettling tale ensues. The dialogue feels real and grounded, the storyline is well paced, and this exploration of people damaged by belief has a very effective and powerful conclusion.
The artwork by Simon Davis is stunning. Characters are portrayed with a stark realism that is subverted by the masterful colouring, flecks of white across the dark blue of a character’s hair becoming constellations. The woods and the people lost within them are rendered otherworldly, the natural world, stark and brutal. This is a comic that is red in tooth, claw and blade, and all the better for it.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward INJ Culbard
Self Made Hero, 2021 Pb, pp120-144, £9.99, ISBN 9781910593950 The Shadow Out of Time INJ Culbard
Self Made Hero, 2021 Pb, pp120-144, £9.99, ISBN 978191059396 The King in Yellow INJ Culbard
Self Made Hero, 2021 Pb, pp144, £9.99, ISBN 9781910593943 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath INJ Culbard
Self Made Hero, 2021 Pb, pp144, £9.99, ISBN 9781910593974
The four books in Self Made Hero’s new pocket sized ‘Weird Fiction Library’ are a perfect introduction to the genre. Culbard is very experienced at adapting fiction to the comic book form, and his art is perfect for the surreal and often unsettling subject matter here.
To tackle Lovecraft’s work requires the ability to create a sense of scale on the page, and Culbard does this with great skill. Towers of dream cities rise from empty plains, and disembodied characters float down vast deserted halls. At one point in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph Carter is reduced to little more than a vague shape as he is carried through the air, showing his insignificance to the landscape that surrounds him.
The colouring throughout reminds me of comics such as Tintin. This might sound odd, but works perfectly at unfurling the creeping terror of cosmic horror – look for example at the contrast between twilight skies and the yellow-green in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
With his talent for rendering facial expressions, Culbard is equally successful in bringing to life the often flawed characters in these four stories. The page in Unknown Kadath intercutting the phases of the Moon with Carter’s face is definitely one of my favourites, marking both the passage of time and Carter’s changing mental state.
While all four books are excellent, I’d especially like to highlight The King in Yellow. Robert W Chambers’s classic has received a bit more attention recently due to True Detective, but it’s still not as widely known as Lovecraft’s work, and really should be. It is very odd, even by the standards of weird fiction.
I would highly recommend these four comics as an entry point to weird fiction and cosmic horror. If you want something very different start with The King in Yellow, and pick up The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath first if you like cats.
Beatnik Buenos Aires Diego Arandojo, Facundo Percio Fantagraphics, 2021
Pb, 110pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781683964032
There’s a special joy in reading a comic that opens up a previously unknown world to the reader: I knew nothing about the Beatnik scene in Argentina until reading this comic, and it is filled with characters, cults and personalities as complex and creative as the French Surrealists or the German Expressionists.
Here, Arandojo and Percio introduce Ithacar Jali (volunteer firefighter, artist, and founder of Church of the Final Sun), Iaroslav Kosak (metaphysical photographer), Goldie (forger and trendsetter), and many others. The world of cafés, backstreet theatres, and midnight streets are as much characters as any of the artists. The monochrome, almost smeared, charcoal artwork perfectly complements the stories, reflecting the hazy mythology and inventiveness that grows up around artists. At the end of the book an appendix goes into more detail about the artists, writers, and actors. With Arandojo and Percio as guides, Beatnik Buenos Aires is a joy to discover.