Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #32 by Drew Barth

Fantasy House Party

With the recent publication of DIE #6, I was reminded of another series that I had written about previously: Coda. With its examination of fantasy tropes and classic D&D character classes as starting points for exploring what fantasy is and what it can be, Coda, and its creative team of Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara, became established as one of the best fantasy comic series in quite some time. The final issue of Codacoincided the release of the first volume of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’s DIE—another series that examines fantasy, RPG classes.

Coda is like a traditional D&D game run amok with much of its magic being limited to a scarce resource, character quests proving futile, and whole warring factions undermined by the machinations of manipulative god. This would be a campaign in which every saving roll failed.

DIE uses the role playing game idea more literally, and then twists it. The characters are role-players who must inhabited the fantasy world they have ruined—almost calling back to the ruined world of Coda—and have to deal with the consequences of their teenage actions from when they were originally trapped in the game. There is also the World War I imagery throughout the series—one of Tolkien’s influences when writing about Middle-earth—even going so far as to have a hobbit-esque soldier dying in a trench as a commanding officer in gray smokes a pipe above his corpse. DIE deconstructs fantasy RPGs and their cultural DNA.

The two central figures of DIE and Coda—Ash and Hum, respectively—belong to highly verbal roles. Ash as The Dictator can speak emotions into existence, and Hum the Bard composes stories and ballads that make magic. Ash and Hum deal almost exclusively in deception through most of their series, relying on their words as a means of defense and eschewing responsibility for their impact. Interestingly, Gillen and Spurrier chose these untrustworthy characters as narrators for both series. How much of either story is actually happening, and how much is the manipulative discourse of our narrators? For Coda, we ultimately know that the majority of Hum’s narration is utter lies, no matter how much Hum wishes they were true. As for Ash of DIE, such dishonesty would clash with the themes of DIE at the moment. Then again, we’ll have to wait to see how the rest of the story goes.

DIE and Coda are both series that are masterful in kicking away our genre expectations. All of those subversions come with having a fine-tuned, fundamental understanding of what makes fantasy and role-playing compelling. Through this knowledge, some truly spectacular comics are able to emerge.

Commitment to creation and character drives these stories forward. When we have creators like Gillen and Hans and Spurrier and Bergara, the medium of comics gets better. When creators recast old forms for something new, we get stories that show us how far fantasy and comics can be pushed when given that right amount of thought and insight. Comics need to be pushed forward. DIE and Coda push hard.

Get excited. Play the game.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #30 by Drew Barth

I Was Told By

Imagine, as wild as this sounds, that the United States becomes a theocratic, imperialistic super-state that invades Canada because the Lord said so. That is the story-ground that Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram set their series Little Bird upon. Little Bird is the story of family and the threads that tie them all together despite the ends fraying, the knots accumulating, and a pair of scissors coming in for the cut. There hasn’t quite been anything in comics that looks and feels like Little Bird.

From a visual and paneling standpoint, Bertram wants us awake. His use of everything from the positioning of characters within the panel, the empty space around those characters, and the panel and bleed-space as a means of conveying time maintains this feeling of unease and dread. Consider the first page of the series posted above. The woman, Tantoo, begins with a close-up and a large swatch of space before moving downward to see her position above her small band of Canadian resistance fighters and then finally down to her daughter, the titular Little Bird. For the eye to track her is one fluid movement, but her concern as a character is focused solely on her daughter. Little Bird is the only character Tantoo looks at in these moments. All of this happens before an explosion of unseen violence and a charred earth left behind.

Violence becomes common throughout the series as Little Bird cannot die in an ultimate sense. The result of that first death is the above page, with its panel-in-panel structure and winding moments of character narrative that become a mainstay anytime Little Bird is killed. These moments highlight the absurdity of violence, as there are moments of Kurosawa levels of blood sputtering for the smallest of wounds. But then what are wounds and violence to someone like Little Bird and her grandfather, The Axe?

Red tendrils that constantly appear. The characters are pulled by these tendrils, but the tendrils are never acknowledged. When looking at the progression of the series covers from one to five, we see the characters eventually drowning in this sea of red. These red tendrils exist seemingly outside the story and bring to mind the bleed between panels as they, at time, grab onto characters from outside of the panels themselves. The tendrils exist as a stark reminder of the past and how that past is something that can’t be changed. They push Little Bird by showing her the mistakes her family has made and help bring her out of a cycle of death and life. Little Bird takes full vivid advantage of the comic medium to tell a visceral story.

In the series’ final issue, Van Poelgeest mentions that Little Bird is only a part of a larger narrative in this world. This is a new, breathing world from Van Poelgeest and Bertram and I’m glad they’re digging deeper into it to see what kind of stories come out.

Get excited. There is always more.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.