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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: Kieron Gillen

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #200: The Story of a Story of a Story

23 Wednesday Nov 2022

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

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Dan Mora, Ed Dukeshire, Kieron Gillen, Once & Future, Tamra Bonvillain

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #200 by Drew Barth

The Story of a Story of a Story

Oh, hey, two hundred of these articles. Neat-o.

Anyway, let’s talk about King Arthur. Or a couple versions of King Arthur. There’s a few when you think about it enough. Where did his sword come from? The Lady in the Lake? The Sword in the Stone? Somewhere else? Why not all of the above? That’s the thing about stories and how they’re told—sometimes details can get a little weird depending on who’s doing the telling and why the story is even being told. And this idea of where stories are coming from, how they can impact the world, and the pitfalls in following them to the letter is the main line that runs through Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, and Ed Dukeshire’s Once & Future.

More than anything, Once & Future is a story about stories. More specifically, it’s the old stories that make up our popular consciousness in culture. Things like King Arthur and Excalibur, Beowulf, Robin Hood, King Lear, and anything else that has some kind of power over how we interact with the world. And all of these stories exist in some way just to the left of our own reality in an Otherworld. Sometimes this world bleeds into ours either through knowing that these stories are real or by being dragged into them. And when this breach happens, Bridgette McGuire would have been the one to clean up the mess. But she’s currently in a home and her grandson, Duncan, is large enough to swing a sword around with her guiding him through the oddities of the Otherworld.

Once & Future is one of my favorite series this century. It is Gillen going hard on his storytelling meta, Mora and Bonvillain being some of the most dynamic artist and colorist in the industry, and Dukeshire pulling off some brilliant lettering and dialog balloon placement. Creatively, it’s a synthesis of story: what it can do and how it can do it. It dives into the myths and legends of the British Isles and breaks their bones into something resembling their original states while simultaneously providing us with a version malleable enough to shape into something new. And that’s what many of these stories are: adaptations not far from the truth of something. But they’ve been buried under popular interpretations for so long we don’t even know there’s something else to exhume.

Once & Future exists in this unique state of timelessness that makes ripe for exploration for years. It grabs you and makes you want to explore deeper into the legends it explores and see where they lead. It does that rare balancing act of playful and serious—the peril of having to look down multiple monstrous versions of King Arthur while a pensioner sets up claymore mines to trip up Beowulf. It’s absurd and it’s action and it’s story and it’s everything fun in comics. And any series that can include the beheading of a legally distinct Boris Johnson is always going to be a fun time. 

Get excited. Get folkloric. 

_______

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #2: Guess I’ll DIE

09 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

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A Comic Shop, DIE, Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #2 by Drew Barth

Guess I’ll DIE

First issues are weird things. They’re thesis statements on a series; a contract with the reader that assures them the three to five dollars they paid for that first issue was worth it; a firm artistic statement on what this creative team wishes to do with the comic form. A good first issue outlines what a reader is going to see going forward in a series—letting them know that this may or may not be the particular ride for them. A first issue is, without a doubt, the hardest thing a creative team working on a comic has to get through, with the sole exception being the final issue. But with a first issue like Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ DIE, I absolutely need to be around to see how that final issue plays out.

DIE mockup (CROPPED)

There’s been this ubiquity to issue ones in the past whenever I go into my local comic shop (A Comic Shop) or scroll through the Comixology app. Every week there’s a new series beginning with an interesting premise or a nice cover or a character design that looks fantastic. But I can’t buy them all. I’m broke. So I have to take a first issue incredibly seriously because that first issue is a potential commitment to an entire series. Starting off strong, getting hooks into a reader, is something that’s crucial for comic storytelling as a whole.

With DIE, we’re given a first issue that puts the banquet out for us. We have the premise: a group of six friends play a game of Dungeons and Dragons that sucks them inside and they disappear for two years. Only five return and none of them can talk about what happened in the game. Kieron Gillen himself described it as “goth Jumanji,” and I’m inclined to agree.

But a normal story would focus on the “sucked into a game” aspect of it and run from there. That’s where DIE differs and works with different levels of what first issues should do. The basic premise I’ve described is only the first few pages. What follows after that is a time jump of twenty-five years. We don’t have kids here anymore. These are adults. Traumatized adults. What happened in the past has scarred each of the remaining five deeply to the point where we can see how even thinking about the event triggers an emotional response that draws these characters further into themselves and traumatizing thoughts of the past.

DIE does something I wished more series would try doing. We don’t see the event. We don’t know what happened. We’re not given a massive backstory right in the first issue. We’re given the information we need. We’re given small one or two lines of characters who tell us what we need to know about that person. Like a good D&D campaign, we’re given a small hint of what’s going to happen later. A lot of the time, what I end up seeing in either first in a series or first in a new story line issues is numerous panels of exposition. That exposition feels like the story doesn’t trust the reader to actually read what’s happening. We have to be told what to notice and what’s important despite comics being the best place possible to show. Stephanie Hans is so obscenely good at showing us small character movements and facial expressions while using a color palate to invoke mood. Seeing character costumes feels like a massive moment because of the building up of action and movement and color.

Something like DIE is the kind of first issue that doesn’t come around often, but when it does you can feel a sense of excitement around its release. I’ve read through dozens of first issues that don’t have this sense of movement—they want to languish and draw out single moments that don’t leave a reader with any kind of pay off. DIE is compressed storytelling. It is lean. It shows the reader what little they need to know at the beginning and runs hard with its story. Comics can have a slower pace, there’s never not going to be room for that. But first issues are, and will always be, different beasts. They need speed. A first issue needs to let the reader know that the comic trusts them with the information being given and gives as much as it can as quickly as possible. That speed is the lifeblood of first issues. If a reader doesn’t know, a reader doesn’t care. And a reader that doesn’t care is a reader that doesn’t come back.

Get excited, first issues are happening.


drew barth

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.

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