Each week, Paste reviews the most intriguing comic books, graphic novels, graphic memoirs and other illustrated books.
Snarked #0, by Roger Langridge
Boom! Comics, 2011
Grade: 7.8
Here’s your chance to make up for skipping out on Roger Langridge’s last two series, Boom!’s The Muppet Show and Marvel’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger. Those all ages titles drew well-warranted praise from critics and established significant adult followings, but between external business deals and the why-so-serious grumpery of close-minded continuity addicts they both met premature ends. The common thread is Roger Langridge, of course, who wrote Thor and, as he did on The Muppet Show, pulls double duty as writer-artist on Snarked. With Snarked, Langridge uses Lewis Carroll’s the Walrus and the Carpenter characters as a launching pad for a funny animal comic that looks and feels like it could have existed at any point in the last seven decades. The flamboyant and pretentious Wilburforce J. Walrus comes from a long line of conniving, comedic gluttons, but he’s more devious than Wimpy and less amiable than Falstaff. He treats the Carpenter, Clyde McDunk, less like a friend than a willing but unwitting accomplice too stupid to realize what’s happening. McDunk barely gets a line in the entire comic, serving solely as Walrus’s almost innocently idiotic partner in mischief. A precocious young princess who might as well be named Lucy Van Pelt, her infant brother, and the specter of their missing royal father rounds out the Snarked cast. Langridge’s classic cartooning hints a potential classic indebted both to Carroll’s sense of whimsy and twisted take on Victorian manners, as well as the comedic chaos and character building of Carl Barks’ duck comics. Not bad for an eight-page story (plus back matter). (GM)
One Soul, by Ray Fawkes
Oni Press, 2011
Grade: 8.1
In this hugely ambitious graphic novel, Fawkes has taken an idea explored filmically by Mike Figgis (simultaneous stories) and expanded upon it considerably. One Soul consists of two-page spreads, each page with nine panels, meaning 18 stories run one panel at a time, tracing the lives of people in very different eras and places from conception to death. A Neolithic hunter, a Muslim fighter in the Crusades, a contemporary drug addict, a priestess of Athena in classical Greece and 14 more wink out one by one, their panels going black upon their deaths and then displaying deep questions about the meaning of life and the existence of higher powers. What’s most impressive is the difficulty of the enterprise and the meditative state reading it induces. Sure, you could take it easy on yourself and read each story in isolation, but the beauty of the project is the way that the stories parallel one another in action, theme, or vocabulary. Subtle visual patterns become apparent too, to drive home the point the title makes: that which divides us is smaller than that which unites us as a species. Fawkes can occasionally be a little obvious, and the post-death queries are kind of new agey (you may—although this is rather heretical—find yourself skipping them to return to the stories that continue), but the individual narratives are frequently surprising. Once you figure out the device, you anticipate death around every corner for the characters, but they frequently escape with minor scars, bringing home both the resiliency and the fragility of humanity. This book isn’t light reading; it’s an example of the medium’s great strengths. (HB)
