Debris Issue 3

Trash Talking

Titling your comic Debris stands as a confident choice for the creative team. Such an appellation exudes their faith in the book with the way they’ve exposed their work to a potential collection  of disposable derogatory comments.

While filled with trash, Debris isn’t trash. Debris is a four issue story from Image comics set in the future. Readers begin the tale in a small settlement scratching out a minimalist existence from the land. A guardian and her apprentice defend the settlement from mechanical monsters. The elder guardian is killed; the water supply to the settlement is destroyed, and the youthful guardian ventures into hostile lands to find a way to save the settlement. 

Riley Rossmo’s renderings of rubbish intrigue, dancing back and forth between detailed and complex to minimalist panels reminiscent of Chinese ink paintings or woodblock prints. Initially this shift could grate and raise questions of why every panel doesn’t contain fine rendering of page one of issue three with the Godzilla looking robot trash monster. Yet these shifts in rendering remain essential to the plot and tone of this four issue limited series by slapping the reader to attention and startling them with the pages’ contents and mimicking the pacing of the action occurring on the page.

This variation in Rossmo’s style keeps the reader’s awareness nimble in that each page offers a shift in his visual voice. No page ever comes across as sloppy, or carelessly rendered. Each collection of scenes contains harmonizing balance with panels containing a minimum and maximum of line in various panels. Page four exemplifies this balance of styles. The small panel in the upper left hand corner has the detail of each plate on the trash beast’s armor, rivets are drawn, and hoses and wires appear between the plates. Yet the trash knight has a cape and legs of minimum lines. This same design is echoed in the largest panel. This uneven detail speeds up the reading (a fight scene) to a violent pace. The reader’s attention, much like the character’s, is drawn to and keeps returning to the trash beast. While having one’s eye continually returning to the monster never could substitute for fighting a live version of the beast, this artistic trick captures at least some aspect of fighting debris creatures, keep your eye on the beast.

The book also utilizes this technique throughout the entire issue. If pages 4 and 5 have limited detail, pages 6 and 7 are lush and captivating enough to stare at for some extended time. Pages 8 and 9, with the print version of the book spread before you, almost completely abandon background details in favor of colored blocks (again, another fight transpires), yet pages 10 and 11 return to varied colors and indulge with details within the panel. This pattern loosely continues throughout the rest of the book; a shift occurs about every two pages, if not in the level of details in the panels, then in the panel sizes. This variation causes each set of pages to jump out to the reader. The images act sharp and alert, and slightly unsettle with bold shifts and colors, yet ultimately they unify the book as all the drawings generated from Rossmo’s fingers. 

Having never viewed shifting elements and principles employed in exactly this way in a comic before (and maybe they have been and I just missed…if so dear readers, please enlighten my ignorance), this technique fascinates and keeps one returning each month to sift through the debris, pleasantly surprised by the findings.

Conan the Barbarian #8: Border Fury Part 2

Border Fury: Travels in Cimmeria

by Bêlit Queen of the Black Coast

Hardship reveals the accuracy of one’s own self assessment. Nothing brought the truth of my strengths and limitations to my awareness more than my travels in Cimmeria. Never have I learned so much in such a short span of time. Even the lowliest scribe of Aquilonia could tell you that learning, truly acquiring knowledge, possesses a difficulty more brutal and painful than any lash.

Cimmeria is a great teacher.

I never want to return.

**

Cimmeria is bordered to the north by a mountain range that separates the land from Asgard and Vanaheim. To the east lies a broad set of harsh hills that also border Hyperborea and the Border Kingdom sandwiched between Nemdia and Brythunia and the hills of Cimmeria. The Bosnian Marshes and Pictish wilderness complete the surroundings of my lover’s homeland.

The voyage began when my then boyfriend Conan set off to defend his family name. Initially, being totally smitten with this barbarian from the north, I accompanied him on his obligated return home. Our travels changed the way he looked to me.

Before Cimmeria, Conan appeared to me as a svelte and smooth muscular champion, existing in a relaxed state yet always poised for action.  On the day we set out from his home village to pursue the marauders defaming Conan’s name, he seemed stiffer, more frigid, and his every motion seemed a series of poses rather than smooth continuous motions.  When I looked at him sometimes his eyes seemed too close together, other times they appeared too far apart. I worried yet kept my concern hidden within my hooded cloak. At the time I attributed Conan’s shifting features to the cold of the north which decelerated his nimble and supple flow through the panels of landscape. Now, I wonder if perhaps it was the spell of travel affecting my view of him and the immenseness of his pupils and the effeminate features that the wilderness intensified in the features of my lover. Yet we persevered and dared the Cimmerian wilderness.

For readers contemplating a sojourn into this dark land, know that the even though the land is harsh, it remains constant in its cycles of abuse and punishment. In the morning it rains for about an hour. Every morning. Large rocks and larger rocks obstruct every path and snag the flimsy of foot. It is as if the land itself is growing teeth to devour those foolish enough to dare its maw.

The skies of Cimmeria provide scant comfort or opportunities for alleviating gloom. While never blue, the most cheerful sky one can hope to see above in Cimmeria is a dull grumpy gray. Often sinister shades of yellow and tan wash the sky. The colors hint that the heavens are waiting to distribute harsh rains, snow, high winds, a tornado, or a thick fog to cover a tracking pack of wolves. The soul of Cimmeria resides with its acrid landscape and sky, yet I realized that the somber gloom-enhancing colors contain the best aspects about my sojourn in this northern land. 

Lands and locations change people, and homelands even more so. Upon returning to his home, my lover changed. The savage nobility I first sensed about him changed to savage fatalism. This land and its people and their attitude towards misfortune and hardship showed me that what I thought was nobility was a giving up, a sad placid acceptance of pain, despair, cruelty, and death. This acceptance of the Cimmerians didn’t fortify or ennoble their souls, it eroded and destroyed them. And this attitude was working upon my lover too. He says Cimmerians recognize their place in the world, but one’s place in this land is under the twisting boot of their cruel god Crom. We must leave these lands if I ever hope to hope again.

“…Just remember this is not a world you know” were the last words my lover said to me before he set off to move faster to slay those who slandered his name and brought more misery on an already miserable populace. His departure was a relief, a welcomed freedom of solitude that gave me time to think, to brood. Cimmeria has that affect on a traveler. Like riding through a desert and finally topping a dune and spying an ocean with two birds soaring uninhibited in a warm and welcoming soft yellow sky is the relief I felt at not having to look at the changed face and demeanor of my lover. I know he cares and wants to help, but the help he offered isn’t the kind I need. His absence finally let the battle begin between me and Cimmeria. If this land wins, it will devour me, whether physically or spiritually and it will forever cage the strong spirit of Conan within its borders. If I can survive and escape this land with Conan, then we can go to better more hospitable and profitable realms. Then I win. If we escape, I triumph over this grating, miserable, and unwelcoming land. And I take with me not only my lover, but the added realization of the lessons the lands have to teach. When once again upon the decks of the Tigress, this knowledge will guide our destinations and selections of those lands upon which we choose to land. For now though, fellow travelers, know that while Cimmeria offers no joys, it does give those who dare its borders a hard and dark Truth.

Prophet Trade 1: Remission

What benefits sprout from a trade collection of monthly comic books? Comics best thrive in a serialized format, a publication sequence that allows time to digest and ponder the story and its possibilities between issues…a  publication regime that doesn’t overwhelm or burn out the reader…20 pages of Justice League Dark parceled out once a month are fine…200 pages of Justice League Dark all at once would be too much. Hence, the allure of a trade collection of monthly comic issues never converted me.

All has since changed.

Prophet showed trade collections exist as a second coming, a reissue of good news, for those of us who missed the first opportunity at experiencing a rapture (plus there excerpts from Brandon Grahams sketchbook with his initial Prophet designs are included).

I’m converted.

Initially the cover of Prophet 21 intrigued, but I neglected to follow the series because a cursory glance illicited a negative reaction to the art (the same disdain occurred when looking at the first issue of MIND MGMT…surely some lesson should have been learned by now) and boredom arose at another tale of a lone man wandering an apocalyptic landscape. Reading the tale in trade revealed that there was much more lurking in the story than a man and his apocalypse. The trade transformed that reaction. The Prophet story reads well collected, and the experience of reading the issues back to back allow for an immersion into this strange world that won’t allow readers to reach escape velocity.

And what a world! I realize I’m boarding the Prophet bus (or rocket) late, yet still Prophet shatters any jaded desensitization to tumbled earth empires with its redefinition of strange.

Aside from torquing one’s mind and weaving a captivating story (as if these two points aren’t reason enough), what other machinations could the oddness of Prophet exert on the human mind? In an excerpt from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, the Vermont philosopher/educator writes “The moral function of art itself is to do away with prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive.”  Dewey here leans on “adherence to a preliminary opinion or feeling without thought or experience” for an understanding of “prejudice.” While someone may obtain some odd looks (and provocative solicitations) if others hear them espousing appreciation for the moral function of Prophet that banishes stale depictions of a ravaged future earth. Part of the allure of the story that simultaneously orients and disorients is Simon Prophet’s knowledge of this future earth. Prophet holds more knowledge than readers, and we’re able, slightly, oh so very slightly fellow and future-fellow Prophet followers, to glean some knowledge of location and the new species that have evolved and some causes, or hints of causes, at the state of this future-present earth. Yet, there is much that Simon Prophet doesn’t know, or doesn’t reveal in his refreshing and much welcomed and appreciated lack of laments or brooding on solitude or the harsh changes that beset his home planet. The details occupying the background banish the prejudice of an overexposed future earth’s devastation and offer readers a fresh visceral experience of running free like a virgin in an alien-highjacked world.[1] The organic mixtures of the non-human with the human and biological bondings give a strange air to the book. The definition of humanity has slackened from the physical and individual, and grasps at something else for the future of the species. Simon Prophet’s bonding with the Dolmantle and an alien sex fiend, consumption of human flesh, and utilizing a regrown-alien arm disrupts the notions of humanity. Be warned however, if a Prophet Cookbook should ever be released, one would be wise to pass on the gastronomical grimoire.

Oracles often precede prophets, so please treat the gathered “Sayings for the Prophet” on each issue of Graham and crew’s collected six issues as a call from the converted to follow this Prophet.

A

A lyrical ballad altering the familiar to the strange for a copied laconic questing knight birthed from a mechanized buried womb that emerged from Mother Earth  and unleashed its spawn in a Darwin-ransacked land. Simon Prophet returns like a genetic remembrance manifests in a world of crashed space ships and four-jawed Talnakas before brown, red and blue color schemes.

B

Grey, tan, and brown color the Taza Caravan’s trek beneath the power shell repelling flesh-hungry desert insects. Bug-evolved Oiiz and time-altered caravaning elephants perform sacrificial kingly rituals while a trophy-hunting sportsman bugs yields to a killing whim.

C

Tower reached.  Quest complete. Clones awake. Veil lifts. Story arc ends. The given conclusion generates greater queries. The new earth empire rouse from its slumber.

D

Same name, different clone.  New place, and a new plot within the plot accompany the new artist. Radiation-rich atmosphere slowly balds and poisons the hero as it corrupts his flesh, and the close simultaneously triumphs and fails in a fight with himself after traversing the corrupting innards of an orbiting robot city. Neonaught skin protects the lapsarian slip to an earth-empire mother.

E

A Jaxson robot (?) wanders for its Jung brother in a minimalist-hard-line background while the empire ceaselessly beckons. Worm-hole rings usher the wanderer to the light for transmission of the message: “John…It’s starting again.”

F

An armed clone trinity defend an Arch Mother amidst chromatic wizardry of browns, blues, and oranges. All die from the swift fingers of a John Prophet who ascends to the Womb Ship and usurps the Arch Mother’s crown. It has started again.

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[1] Possibly the first Iron Maiden/Madonna allusion back to back in the history of comic book reviews!