Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #23 by Drew Barth

Coda Breaker

There is always going to be a group of writers from the UK that screw with genre conventions and groove their own niches in such a way as to become invaluable members of the comics community.

Alan Moore did it.

Neil Gaiman did it.

Grant Morrison did it.

Warren Ellis physically can’t stop doing it.

Kieron Gillen is doing it now.

Simon Spurrier is one such writer that is currently in the process of doing it. Spurrier’s work takes fantasy comics and twists them on their own neck multiple times until the head pops clean off and we can take a deeper look into the corpse of what’s left behind. And at the root of his work, that idea of what has been left behind, is a theme that plays throughout much of his best comics. From Six-Gun Gorilla to The Spire, his work with Boom! Studios has been illuminating for how far fantasy comics as a genre can be pushed. And with his most recent work, with artist and co-creator Matías Bergara, finishing this month in Coda, we are absolutely diving deeper into the corpse of what remains.

As a series, Coda is a fantasy comic that seems tired of fantasy comics. The word quest is basically a sin and all the old fantasy classes—your knights, paladins, fighters—cling to a former status quo that hasn’t just left, but has been decimated by a cataclysm known only as The Quench. Magic exists, but only in the scarcest of the supplies as the world attempts to contend with not just an uncertain future, but one that might not exist at all.

There are still a god or two hanging around as well and they’re barely clinging to existence, same as everyone else. It is in this intersection of how horrible the world has devolved into that we meet Hum, a bard. As with all bards, he has a magical way with words that allows him to lie, cheat, and steal his way through what remains of this world on a…let’s call it an expedition to gain enough of the old magic, akker as its known, to concoct a cure for his wife who has been taken away by demons. As a story, it’s all well and kind of normal for a fantasy series.

And yet. This is only the story as it is revealed to us in the first issue by Hum. Everything flows through him and the series of letters he’s writing to his wife, Serka, as our main narrative device. Hum’s a liar. We get that fairly early on and having an unreliable narrator in a story is always fun. But how unreliable is the narrator when they’re lying to themselves as well?

If Coda is a work that looks at what remains after something as physically cataclysmic as magic being ripped from the world, then it is also a work that looks at what remains after trust is ripped from a person. And that idea of trust, of having someone believe in a complete lie, is foundational for this series. The main reason we have a character like Hum, a bard, telling us this story is due to the natural proclivities of bards: to be huge liars. In traditional fantasy series, bards are the storytellers. They are yarn spinners whose very words have real, physical presence and power to alter the world around them. That is, so long as those words are pointed in the right direction.

Coda is a series about the lies we tell others, the lies we tell ourselves, and the lies everyone else tells us.

Between all those lies and examining what remains of a nearly dead world? Some of the best and most expansive world building I’ve ever seen in a twelve issue series. Walled cities that cling to old traditions, from their league of paladins to the giant cannon that defends the city’s walls? Spurrier and Bergara have that for you. Or maybe a wheeled city inhabited by bandits and rogues that is being pulled by a giant whom the city residents appease by feeding pilfered akker? Of course. Perhaps a continuous storm in the desert that allows for barbarians to let off their berserker rage in peace? Absolutely. Because what Spurrier and Bergara do throughout Coda is continuously examine what makes fantasy fantasy. What are the tropes, who are the major players, how do they come to power? They have built a new world from the ground up after burning down an old world that adhered to what past fantasy should be.

It is always a marvel to read a series that wants to push comic storytelling further. Spurrier has done it in the past with Six-Gun Gorilla and its deconstructing of what fiction even means and he does it here on a character level with Hum. Coda is a twelve issue character study with its camera trained so tight on the leading character that we as readers don’t even notice when the world is setting up to kill them. To see the examination of Hum done so well with the world building in tow only cements Coda further as a wonderful triumph of a series.

Get excited. More worlds are coming.

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 #22 by Drew Barth

Collaboration Junkie

When we talk about comics we also talk about the unique environment in which they are produced. Collaboration is key and, as time goes by, strong teams emerge. We have the classics like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as well as Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. In the more recent era, we have teams like Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

Brubaker and Phillips made a major contribution to the canon of graphic literature with My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies .

Junkies is the story of Ellie, a young girl in a rehabilitation facility with romantic notions of drug use in conjunction with art and music. We follow her through her short time in the facility, her escape, and subsequent consequential misadventures. As a graphic novel, it is absolutely everything a reader would want from Brubaker and Phillips: moral ambiguity, crime, silent panels, expressions that fill empty space with unspoken words, noir as all hell feelings of labyrinth running, and an ending that falls like an anvil on our collective stomachs. There is a reason Junkies is up for an Eisner award this year.

My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies is stand alone, but it is also a part of a wider series of comics Brubaker and Phillips have been working on together for over ten years called Criminal. And I will admit that Junkies is my first foray into this decade-long crime opera they have created.

I want more of it. Luckily, there are roughly seven different collected editions of the various series and a new mini-series coming out through Image right now.

Series like Criminal are fascinating in how the Brubaker and Phillips team have been maintaining this singular story for over a decade now through multiple mini-series and two different publishers. On the surface, very few comic creators operate in this way. A typical series runs anywhere from twelve to sixty issues over a year or more and that’s it. With the exception of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram, not many other teams have been putting out these smaller scale and interconnected stories. And to add a graphic novel like My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies to the mix just makes this extra element to the stories Brubaker and Phillips are telling. As a team, they are creating comics on a macro and micro level that can explore what it means to be a complete story. And I love that that kind of experimentation with the form can not only exist, but thrive as well.

The stories that Brubaker and Phillips create come with their own soundtrack. One of their collaborations from a few years ago, The Fade Out, is a story that sounds like the pop and fizzle of a record player that needs to be hand cranked. It sounds like someone laughing through a wall at a party when we thought everyone had already left. The Fade Out is seeped in old Hollywood noir and I don’t even mean the movies of the era. As a twelve issue piece of Brubaker and Phillips, it is one of the greatest pieces of comic fiction of this century.

Collaboration is the heart of comics. To look at a page from Brubaker and Phillips or Gillen and McKelvie or O’Neil and Adams is to see a conversation. Whether what we see dazzles us with pure pop splendor, amazes us with the hammers of justice smiting evil, or brings us quiet panels with menace laced through their gutters, we always know when we see a great page of comics. And to see many of these creators making some of the greatest work possible only adds another layer to the joy that comics can create. Because comics are rarely about the singular. Even stories by one creator still have the people we don’t see or hear contributing and helping in ways we’ll never know. To keep comics as a medium fresh and fantastic, we need those collaborations and partnerships. More voices in comics will never be a bad thing.

Get excited. We’re making stories together.

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 #20 by Drew Barth

This Must Be the Comic (Naive Recipe)

The visceral look and dynamic panel-to-panel sequencing in comics make them ideal for a fairly wide range of stories. When looking at lists of graphic novels and comics out in the world now, there’s a high chance if you imagine something, its comic equivalent exists. With my own obsessions with certain cooking shows like Street Food and Ugly Delicious as well as some personal follies throughout the kitchen, I started thinking more and more about food in comics. Because that’s what I do while I’m waiting for water to boil. And when the fantastic creator Lucie Bryon posted a short comic on how to make peanut pasta I kind of had to talk about the ways in which food and graphic storytelling intertwine. Partially because there is a wealth of really interesting work out in the world, but mostly because that recipe was so good I had to write about it.

I’ve noticed in all the food-based comics I read that they can be split into two categories: 1) Food based nonfiction works that can encompass recipe guides as well as graphic memoirs that looks to weave a love for food throughout the narrative while maintaining the visual splendor that the comic form brings. And 2) Food adventures that are all typically expansive science fiction pieces that deal with food as commodity, survival, or power—the latter of which you can read more about in my review of Joseph Keatinge and Wook Jin Clark’s Flavor. Both of these sub-genres of food comics have a wealth of wonderful work associated with them, but I just wanted to focus on a couple in this article.

It would be nigh impossible to write about food related graphic memoirs without mentioning Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley. Published by First Second a few years back, Relish is the story of Lucy and the myriad ways in which food has influenced and permeated every aspect of her life. From her dad’s butcher block in the kitchen to her mom blowtorching birthday cakes every year. But what continually makes her graphic memoir so enticing is the way in which it presents food and recipes.

I’ve read a lot of cookbooks and watched a lot of cooking shows. Nothing compares to having a  recipe drawn out in comic form to replicate it perfectly every time. Both Bryon and Knisley render their recipes fantastically throughout Food Babyand Relish respectively to the point where I’ve made a large portion of their recipes multiple times simply because comics as a medium are perfect for the task of cooking. While cookbooks leave much to the imagination and cooking shows involve a lot of pausing, going back, and quick cuts to the finished product fresh out of the over, comic recipes really take the reader into consideration. Presenting recipes as side-to-side images with the floating text as a means of directing the reader’s eyes from panel to panel and step by step helps to put the mind at ease. The level of mastery of comic mechanics make putting comic recipes down one of the more difficult tasks for a creator, but Food Baby and Relish do it marvelously. And deliciously.

And where the above mentioned comics are in some ways similar to Good Eats or Barefoot Contessa, these latter series have more in common with No Reservations than anything. Where on one hand we can have food as a facet of life, we can also have food as a grand adventure.

In that intersection of science fiction, culinary adventures, and some of the best comics to come out of this century sit the series Wonton Soup by James Stokoe and Space Battle Lunchtime by Natalie Reiss. The former deals with two friends traveling the universe to create the best food possible and the latter is an abducted baker being made to compete in an intergalactic cooking reality show. While the plots of these stories are incredibly fun, they treat their food not as a backdrop, but with Studio Ghibli-esque care and reverence. As the cooking competition becomes murderously fierce and our lead character, Peony, finds new alien friends in Space Battle Lunchtime, we are continually introduced to new ingredients, new ways of cooking, and new ways of seeing food through a lens we as readers are not accustomed to. Likewise in Wonton Soup where Stokoe gives us alien landscape after alien cityscape all in pursuit of the greatest ingredients for our main characters’ palettes. Even if the alien metaphor in each series is a bit obvious, they still encourage us as readers to strike out into something culinaryily unexpected.

A commonality between comics and food that isn’t brought up that often is the fact that each of them is something that brings people together. How often do we see documentaries about comics or food that don’t include stock footage of kids gathered around issues of Action Comics with bicycles huddled around them or nonnas serving up massive bowls of spaghetti to families laughing around a table? Even now, and something brought up often in Relish, is the idea of people coming together to share in what they have—to build a community together. Food and comics do this constantly. And every single comic I’ve brought up in this article savors that idea as essential. From new friendships in Space Battle Lunchtimeto the strengthening of bonds in Wonton Soupto the recipes that inspired us in Food Baby and Relish to then cook something for our friends, we as readers want that communal feeling. Comics are a community and food only helps to strengthen the community further. Even if you’re not someone invested in the comic community, there’s still recipes plenty here to make your own community just a little bit closer.

Get excited. Dinner’s ready.

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.