Reviews – Page 22

The Golden Age, Book 1 by Roxanne Moreil & Cyril Pedrosa

Reviews
February 24, 2022

The title is ironic. Or maybe more than ironic: this is not the story of a golden age , but there is a book in this fictional world called “The Golden Age.” So it is, perhaps, a story called “The Golden Age” that centers on another story called “The Golden Age.”

The back cover says The Golden Age, Book 1 takes place in the kingdom of Antrevers: the narrative never gets that specific. It is a medieval kingdom , somewhere vaguely Western European. Given that the creators – co-writer Roxanne Moreil and writer/artist Cyril Pedrosa – are French – you could call it a fantasy version of France, and not be far wrong.

In the manner of fairy tales, there is no wider world: we don’t know what countries border Antrevers, and it doesn’t matter. This kingdom is the world of the story; everything will happen within it.

Antrevers has been getting poorer and life harder for a generation or so. Crops are not as fertile, life is not as easy. Again, trade and development are left unmentioned: this is a single kingdom in a static, medieval world. The nobles have been increasing taxes to maintain their position; the peasants have been complaining, and starting to rebel, in turn. Repression of those peasants has been ramping up, under Louys de Vaudemont, one of the most powerful nobles.

The old king has just died. If his name was thrown out, I didn’t catch it. He leaves an aged wife – also left unnamed, and her exact title after his death is vague, too – and two children. There’s a younger son, but his older sister, Tilda, is expected to inherent – this is not a world with a Salic Law, I suppose.

Tilda is our main viewpoint character: a bit headstrong, determined to use her authority and power to make life better for the entire kingdom, to reverse the downward slide of all of Antrevers. To that end, she has been talking about shaking up the power of the nobles – not eliminating that power, probably not even curtailing it that much, but putting some royal limits on what nobles had gotten used to doing unfettered. She is young and energetic and sure she is right. She will learn others are equally sure of their rightness , believing entirely different things.

We enter this world like diving into a pool: Pedrosa’s first few pages are full-bleed, with bright colors, single images in an illustrative, almost impressionist style filling our vision. He mostly settles down to bordered panels after that, but breaks out the full-page art for major moments: this is a visually stunning book. He brings all of the fairy-tale energy and life of his earlier Three Shadows, combining it with the mastery of color and space he showed in Portugal .

Similarly, Moreil and Pedrosa introduce us to a group of peasants first: our story may be mostly among the powerful, but it’s about all the people of this kingdom. From there, the narrative makes its way to court and Tilda, as she meets faithful retainer Lord Tankred and the young swordsman Bertil, who may also have been a childhood playmate of hers. The three of them are soon traveling together, for reasons I don’t want to spoil, but you can guess at how the old nobles are reacting to Tilda’s impending coronation.

Tilda looks to gather allies: we’ve heard a lot about “the Peninsula,” and she heads there, to rendezvous with Lord Albaret, who she knows is loyal to her. They will find other places along the way, particularly a hidden community of women – something like a secular nunnery, or sanctuary – as the story circles around the ideas of governance, power, and noblesse oblige. Tilda has good intentions, but do revolting peasants want any Queen, even a fairly benevolent, forward-thinking one? And can Tilda conceptualize a government without someone like her ruling it by decree?

On top of all that, this is a fantasy story. There is some power that Tilda will find, at the end. She also has visions throughout: visions that make her weak, shattering her normal life and making her collapse, visions of war and fire and danger, in which she is an imposing, commanding figure.

This is Book 1. It ends on a cliffhanger, after more than two hundred pages. But the story, I’m told, ends in the second book, which is out now. I can’t tell you about that book yet – I need to find it now, myself – but I can tell you the first one is compelling and gorgeous and all-enveloping and amazing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Good Night, Hem by Jason

Reviews
February 17, 2022

I had the wrong idea about this book. I feel like I say that a lot in this blog, but why not say it if it’s true? We all come into new experiences with expectations and ideas, and we’re all wrong a lot of the time. There’s no shame in saying so.

I expected Good Night, Hem to be a standalone graphic novel about Ernest Hemingway. Since it’s by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, I thought there might be a genre element of some kind, or that it might be told slyly in some other way: I didn’t expect a straightforward biographical story.

I wasn’t far wrong, but I’d forgotten that Jason had already written about Hemingway and his Paris circle of the 1920s in The Left Bank Gang – well, sort-of, since those characters had the names of the Lost Generation circle but were comics creators planning a bank robbery. And I didn’t know that Good Night, Hem is also a sequel to The Last Musketeer [1], since Athos is a major character here.

So, to sum up: Good Night, Hem is not really a sequel to the previous Jason book in which “Ernest Hemingway” appeared, but it is a sequel to a completely different Jason book that was not about Hemingway. This is par for the course for Jason: you don’t go to his books for straightforward and obvious.

Oh, one other thing: it’s not a single narrative , but three loosely linked shorter stories: one in Paris and Spain in 1925, when Hemingway is inspired to write The Sun Also Rises; one in Paris and other points in 1944, where Hemingway is inspired to lead a group of young Frenchmen (are they supposed to be writers? I’m not sure) to train, airdrop into Berlin, and capture Hitler to end the war early; and a short coda set in Cuba in 1959, where Hemingway muses on Athos, their combined histories, and life in general.

So it is largely about Athos, in a sideways, Jason fashion. Hemingway is the focal character, but Athos is more interesting and harder to understand – the story is told from Hemingway’s viewpoint, but it’s largely about Athos (except that odd middle section).

I also think Jason’s books have gotten less dense recently: he switched from a mostly nine-panel grid to a four-panel grid, so each page has bigger, more open panels with less action and dialogue. On the other hand, I don’t have the books in front of me to check, but I also think his recent books are longer – so I may be saying they have about the same amount of action, but spread out onto more pages, so it feels longer and more relaxed.

What happens? Well, the first section is pretty straightforward and relatively close to history, only with the addition of an immortal musketeer in the group going to Pamplona: it’s focused, like Sun itself, on the sexual tensions within the group, and adds to them by having Athos and Hemingway be essentially doppelgangers. (Not that Jason has that many character types to begin with, so this may be lampshading in his part.)

The second section is an old-fashioned nutty Jason story, along the lines of I Killed Adolph Hitler, in which completely crazy, impossible things are presented straightforwardly and just happen anyway.

And the ending is, again, more of a coda, summing up Hemingway’s view of Athos and cataloging all of their interactions. (He also inspired The Old Man and the Sea!)

I didn’t think this completely came together as one thing – the middle section is too different in tone, style, and concerns – but all of the pieces are good, and all show Jason doing good work in his mature style. I wouldn’t pick this up as a first Jason book – Hitler or the newer Lost Cat or maybe Werewolves of Montpelier are better choices to start – but it’s a fine continuation.

[1] No good link for that book: it was the first Jason book I read, in March of 2009 when I was an Eisner judge, so I stuck it in the middle of a massive post covering the 94 books I read that month.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith

Reviews
February 16, 2022

I cannot prove that this book originated as a story pitch for The Incredible Hulk, sometime in the dim misty past. But I fervently believe it, and that’s what matters in the world today, right?

Monsters is a massive graphic novel written and illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith; he apparently has been working on it, off and on, for thirty-five years. (I didn’t hear a word about it until it was published; I’m not clear if he worked on it quietly the whole time or if he had mentioned it and I just never heard.) It aims to be a serious book , but it has an inherent pulpiness that drags it back down over and over again, and a loose-limbed structure that introduces its own issues.

For most potential readers, the big point is that it contains over three hundred and sixty pages of BWS art, some of those among the best in his career. It’s all also entirely in his mature style; there’s no visual indication in this book that it took four decades to make. So this is a visually stunning book: BWS has been a great craftsman of comics pages for about fifty years now (counting from his game-changing stint on Conan), and this is a major, major milestone in any appreciation or evaluation of his career.

The story though, does feel like a lightly warmed-over Hulk story. There’s a monster: gigantic, almost indestructible, mentally tormented, uncommunicative. There are evil scientists (some of them, inevitably, Nazis) and almost-as-evil military types. There’s abuse from a father in the past. There’s an escape, under gunfire, from a military base, the monster hiding out with a helper in an isolated house with military choppers angrily buzzing overhead, and a shoved-in “power of public opinion” moment that nearly gets lost.

There’s also a major thread about supernatural powers, which are not terribly well defined and seem to be able to do whatever the story needs them to do. (Not to save their owners from death, admittedly, but being dead doesn’t slow possessors of “the shine” anyway.)

It’s all told in more-or-less straightforward comics, but it’s not particularly well-structured for the length. All of these pages, all of these moments, could have formed a stronger story if corralled somewhat more tightly, reorganized a bit, and if BWS or an editor had imposed a stronger structure on the story. (This, though, would have meant redrawing or reworking some number of pages – probably including some from thirty years before. That may have not been plausible.)

Instead, the story meanders, telling us one thing and then another, adding layers and depths as it goes – but in a fashion that leads this reader to suspect it happened as BWS worked on the pages, and that he didn’t go back to integrate his new ideas into old pages. One particularly egregious example: one character barges in , declaring that he’s the Governor of this state, and is accepted as such….but he admits, a hundred pages later, that he was just pretending. Now, in this world, the Governor of a state is a public figure, and everyone knows who that guy is. So this is just not a ruse that can actually work.

The Nazi, who is basically the main villain, is unavailable for the big ending, so he gets understudied by a military guy – who, humorously to me, is actually named Ross, as if that was the only word remaining from the Hulk pitch.

It’s all set in the late ’40s (mostly 1949) and 1964-65, but only the furniture (cars, hairstyles, WWII uniforms) makes it feel like a period story. I suspect there are multiple expressions used in dialog that are anachronistic; this feels like a contemporary story told in a different time to make the Nazi/WWII connection make sense.

All in all, this has pretty much exactly the strengths and weaknesses of a book that a respected but idiosyncratic creator worked on quietly and alone for decades: it looks great, it has a lot of good ideas and moments, the characterization is excellent. But it’s also lumpy, with a structure that feels like a sequence of pages in the order that the creator thought of them rather than the order that would best serve the story, and later revelations that are not adequately set up. It’s good, but you can see the better book that it should have been.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Patience by Daniel Clowes

Reviews
February 9, 2022

It’s never a good thing to realize, halfway through, that you’ve read a book before. Especially when you’ve just bought a shiny new copy, and the realization includes the fact that another copy – just as shiny, also bought new – is probably on a shelf upstairs in your house. (I haven’t looked yet; maybe it isn’t. Maybe I read it from a library the first time?)

You see, if you read a book again on purpose, that’s fine: it means you remember it, and want to experience it again. And reading a new book is obviously normal. But thinking it’s new to you when it isn’t – that’s not a good experience.

So I re-read Patience yesterday (as I write this). It was the 2016 graphic novel from Daniel Clowes, and is still his most recent book. I read it for the first time in 2017, and let me take a second to re-read what I wrote about it then.

OK, I agree with all of that. Clearly I didn’t remember it deeply, and I trusted my Books Wanted list more than I should have, but it’s a solid Clowes story , very much in his usual style and manner. For all of Clowes’s characters’ histrionics , I find I don’t really engage emotionally with them: they are very emotional people who Clowes often seems to be examining like a scientist with a bug.

That may be one reason why I don’t remember Clowes stories viscerally: they’re all distanced to begin with. The Clowes affect subliminally says “these people are damaged and wrong in various ways; pay attention to them but don’t care about them.” I doubt Clowes intends this affect for Patience, but it’s so ingrained into how I read his work, so tied to his art style and method of viewing characters, that he’d need to change a lot to break that habit. And I suspect I’m not alone in this.

Anyway, Patience is a good Clowes book that didn’t impress itself strongly in my memory. Everything I said in my old post is still how I’d characterize it as a story. I have no new insights to impart. Come back tomorrow; with luck, I’ll have a read a book for the first time and have something interesting to say about it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Joshua W. Cotter

Reviews
February 2, 2022

The memory of a book is not the same as an initial assessment , or a re-read. Looking back, when starting to write about Joshua W. Cotter’s excellent graphic novel Skyscrapers of the Midwest , I see that I read it at almost the same time as Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole. At the time, I said Skyscrapers was my favorite, but I’ve thought about Swallow much more often in the past decade, and returned to Powell’s work in a way I haven’t for Cotter.

So which of the two is “better”? 2008 Andy thought it was Skyscrapers. The default Andy of about 2010-2020 would probably say Swallow if asked to choose between the two. And today, after I’ve just re-read Skyscrapers?

Today I think I’m going to say picking between two books by completely different people is a silly game, that books are not in competition with each other in any sense other than for attention in the moment. The world is wide; there’s room for everything. There’s especially lots of room for strong books.

But today I have just re-read Skyscrapers. And I seem to be avoiding writing about it directly – maybe because what I wrote in 2008 is still entirely applicable and I don’t really have anything to add to that. This is the story of a boy who probably is a semi-fictionalized version of Cotter himself , at the age of 10 in 1987. I wrote about a lot of the impressive elements of the story a decade ago, and I only have a few things to add to that.

There’s a subplot here about a young man – eighteen or twenty, I guess – who looks a lot like the young protagonist and is in a bad relationship (almost entirely because of him) with a woman of the same age. Reading Skyscrapers this time, I wondered if that was supposed to be a flashforward, the same boy a little older. I don’t think so: the rest of the book is set in 1987, and there’s no transitional elements to imply that shift in time. More importantly, he interacts with the main plot once, so he must be a different person – maybe similar, maybe a warning of what the protagonist could become.

There’s also some fake-nonfiction elements as part of the package – the letter column is answered by a cowboy named “Skinny Kenny,” as the biggest example, but there are also some fake ads and similar stuff. This is loosely incorporated into the overall story, since “Skinny Kenny” replies to letters that, at least in one case, is clearly by a character in the story and is about the story.

But those are the only major pieces I didn’t mention in my old post: otherwise, I agree with what 2008 Andy said. This is impressive, and it still struck me in 2021 as a lot like a more humanist, less formalist version of a Chris Ware story: similar elements about a similar childhood, with the story heading in a different direction and with a very different art style. In Ware, the story is about how a boy is irreparably broken – whether because of comics, or just adjacent to comics isn’t really important. For Cotter, the hermeticism of a boy’s imagination is both positive and negative, like so many things in life, and his characters need to have other connections, especially to family, to get through those tricky years.

We do sense that this boy will get through; he won’t be broken like a Ware character. And I’m reminded that I’ve lost track of what Cotter has been doing for the past decade, so I really should see if he’s done anything else this strong.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

In. by Will McPhail

Reviews
January 28, 2022

This graphic novel is just too damn good to be Will McPhail’s first book-length project. He has to have a drawer-full of stuff, or maybe he’s published short work somewhere. The drawing I completely believe; I’ve seen his cartoons and they’re assured enough that I believe he could easily make the jump from single panels to juxtaposed images. But the story here? How does someone go from a one-line joke to a full-realized story of almost three hundred pages?

So, um, yeah, this is pretty good. In. is apparently the first long narrative Will McPhail has created, and it works from beginning to end.

It’s about this guy, Nick, who lives in a big city (not unlike McPhail, who lives in Edinburgh, though this city is more vaguely New York) and works as an artist (also not unlike McPhail). He’s got a sister , as a surreal scene that Nick falls into – it’s related to the topic, loosely and visually, but McPhail is not illustratingÂ what Nick learns. Instead, he’s showing what it feels like: a visual, comics metaphor for a deep human connection.

The rest of the book looks like McPhail’s cartoons: line art with light washes of gray for emphasis and texture. But the surreal sections are fully painted, and striking every time they appear. (McPhail also signposts that a color scene is about to begin by zooming into the speaker’s face and showing their eyes in color: another nice visual metaphor about seeing that only works in comics.)

I don’t want to detail what the story is about from there: every story is in the telling of it. Nick does start out a bit immature, a bit unconnected – that’s the pointÂ – and learns how to be different. Along the way, McPhail does things right both big (those surreal scenes, the overall flow of the book, all of the characterization) and small (a dozen throwaway joke names for coffee bars and alcohol bars, an amusingly arch depiction of Nick and Wren’s first sexual encounter).

One of the most impressive things, particularly for a first book, is that I can point to something like a dozen things that McPhail does really well, and nothing at all that I’d seriously criticize. No book is perfect, but I’d be hard-pressed, even as a former editor, to point to anything in In.Â that I’d have red-penciled or asked for revisions on.

So: yeah. Really impressive. Thoughtful, deep, meaningful, lovely. Takes advantage of the comics form brilliantly, though I can still see someone wanting to turn this into a movie. (They’d probably screw it up, since it’s already as good as it can be, but it would have four great parts to entice various actorly types.) If you haven’t read it, you probably will want to.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Alias the Cat! by Kim Deitch

Reviews
January 27, 2022

I don’t know if all of the Waldo stories are consistent. I don’t know if they can be consistent, or if Deitch would want them to be.

I kind of hope they aren’t, actually. Memory is flawed, history is misunderstood, the past is a mystery. And demon-creatures shouldn’t be completely knowable, able to be nailed down to a specific timeline.

Alias the Cat! is a Waldo story: it’s almost twenty years old now, but close to the last major Waldo story to date. It followed A Shroud for Waldo and The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (probably the centerpiece of the Waldo universe) and was in turn added onto by The Search for Smilin’ Ed. Deitch’s most recent book, Reincarnation Stories, is a similar style but doesn’t include Waldo as far as I remember.

What does any of that mean?

Well, Deitch presents himself as an autobiographical cartoonist, one fascinated by popular entertainments of the early 20th century: cartoons, circuses, movie serials, comic strips, carnivals, and so on. Ephemeral stuff, things that are largely forgotten or lost. His big stories, for the last thirty years or so, tend to combine his discovery of some old piece of entertainment with a retelling of that old story – or the circumstances surrounding those people, or a complicated combination of the two. We get comics pages of Deitch talking to the reader directly, about the things he’s discovered, and pages of him doing things in his life, and we also get stretches retelling the history he’s discovered, or – as in this book – supposedly reprinting old comics by someone else from a hundred years before. It all combines together into fictions that mimic non-fiction, as surreal and supernatural elements are first hinted at and then leap into the center of the story.

They’re impossible, and Deitch presents them all as if they’re true. I’d say he presents them “straightforwardly,” but he doesn’t – Deitch portrays himself as excitable, eager to chase down these crazy ideas, as maybe more than a little bit naïve or gullible, someone always ready to believe in a great story.

Alias the Cat! is a three-part story: it appeared originally as three separate comics, in 2002, 2004, and 2005, and each volume has that Deitch energy and enthusiasm – each one has that air of “hey, look at what I just discovered!” They each end inconclusively, with mysteries left unsolved: even the third, even the end of this book and story.

Again, that’s the nature of history, of the kind of stories Deitch tells. There’s only so much Deitch-in-the-story can find out, only so much that has survived a hundred years. Only so much Waldo will tell, or allow to be told.

Waldo is a anthropomorphic character, like a black cat – call him Felix’s evil twin, or dark doppelganger. He was a character in forgotten ’20s cartoons, or a real creature impossibly in the real world, or a supernatural entity centuries old, or a hallucination only seen by the insane: he’s all of those things in turn, or at the same time. He’s a trickster at heart, a hedonist who has been everywhere and done everything and is ready to tell entertaining and possibly even true stories about those places and things.

As Alias the Cat! opens, Deitch-the-character insists he’s never met Waldo, and that he’s not saying that Waldo is a real person in the actual world. He likes Waldo stuff

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Reviews
January 25, 2022

To me, the core Neil Gaiman stories are about young people, encountering things they don’t understand. The Ocean at the End of the Lane. “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” Violent Cases. Coraline, something of an edge case – since the core set of stories are all about a young person like Gaiman.

And, of course, Mr. Punch .

I don’t want to speculate how much of this story is “true.” That’s the wrong question anyway: the truth of a story is the story-ness of it , and this is a great story, told beautifully by Gaiman’s words and Dave McKean’s art. (I wish they had worked together more: they are each other’s best collaborators.)

It’s a graphic novel about a young British boy, about fifty years ago, remembered by that boy as a man, about twenty-five years later. So it’s now as far back in time itself as the events it depicted were when it was published: this is a 1995 book about things that happened in the late ’60s. The boy is Gaiman. Or he is not. Or, more accurately, that again is not the right question.

It’s the story of how the boy learned about Punch and Judy shows, about his grandfather’s failing seaside business, about family stories. Like all stories about childhood, it’s about memory most of all: what is remembered, how it’s remembered, what looms larger looking back than it did at the time. It is an intensely told story, constructed carefully by Gaiman even as it seems to be narrated off-the-cuff by the man in the story who is and is not Gaiman.

And

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Sex Criminals, Vol. 6: Six Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

Reviews
December 30, 2021

So I’m a year late here: I was going to point out that this series took longer to complete than I expected, and so I was not as invested in this book as I could have been. But one whole year of the delay is on me, so mentioning that a comic that started in September 2013 and only ran thirty-one issues probably shouldn’t have taken seven years might not come across well.

Or maybe I’ll passive-aggressively say I’m not going to do that. Pointless passive-aggression is pretty on-brand for a discussion of Sex Criminals, right?

Anyway, Six Criminals is the sixth and last collection of the comic: it includes the final story arc (well , energy) in order to power what he hopes is a time machine. Yes, that’s very weird: Sex Criminals has kept digging new levels of weird from the initial some-people-freeze-time-when-they-come premise, as it finds new possibilities for sex-based superpowers.

(Sidebar: Say, do you think Sex Criminals was originally pitched as “Chew , but about fucking”? If not, why not?)

There is a reasonably happy ending for the world in general, if not for Suze and Jon’s relationship, which has looked intermittently doomed the entire length of the series. (Jon in particular has never been the most stable of people.) In the end, it’s still basically Suze’s story, as it started out, though focus wanders around among the rest of the cast, as it must when you have that many people. That part is very realistic, and I appreciated it: so many stories, in comics and out of it, slam the two main characters together at the end even if that’s an inherently bad idea.

I bet this all reads better if you run through it all relatively quickly; I read the first volume back in 2014 and have never re-read older issues before hitting new ones. It’s all good stuff, and adult in both the under-the-counter (it’s about sex! you see nudity and sexual stuff on the page!) and the grown-up (people have relationships that grow and change! those relationships are often weird or nonstandard!) ways. It’s definitely worth reading, if you are old enough to do so legally in your jurisdiction.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

A Shining Beacon by James Albon

Reviews
December 28, 2021

In some world that is not precisely our own – maybe the near future, maybe an alternate present – an island nation has an autocratic, near-fascist government. There is, of course, a revolutionary group aiming to overthrow that regime, which includes violent activities.

It is not the UK, exactly. But it is very much like the UK, more than it’s like any other nation on earth.

The regime is building a major public-works project in the capital: a large sports facility with a huge swimming pool at its center. And the Department of Culture needs to find an artist to paint a giant mural over that pool. The mural must be uplifting but not political, lovely but not challenging, colorful but not incorporating any imagery or ideas from the rebels or anyone else hostile to the regime, artistically powerful but without any deep or hidden messages, and entirely approved by various top ministers.

This is of course impossible. It’s also demanded, and must happen.

Functionaries at the Department of Culture, after several metropolitan candidates are rejected, settle on Francesca Saxon, a youngish woman from the North of the country, an artist with a relatively provincial career so far and no hint of the wrong politics. She is summoned to the capital and set up in a luxury hotel to create that mural. She never applied for the job, or really had a moment to decline it.

She might perhaps have preferred to return home and work in her own studio, but those are not the regime’s plans. And the whole point of autocracy is that it demands everything conforms to its plans, even if those plans change instantly.

Francesca’s mural, or perhaps the sports centre in general, is meant to be A Shining Beacon for the entire nation; that phrase repeats throughout the graphic novel, and clearly was originated by some very high power in the autocracy.

We don’t know who that was; we don’t get names for most of the characters and we never see or understand the top level of this government. Instead, people are known by their function – minster of this, secretary of that – or seen doing what they do. If there is a dictator or politburo over it all, we know nothing of that.

The rebels place someone close to Francesca; she doesn’t realize this for a long time. The rebels perhaps have a strong case against the regime – it is brutal and repressive and murderous – but they are no better themselves , and it’s not clear that this nation would be any better if they were to seize power.

Francesca struggles to make the mural the government demands, as their demands shift almost daily and every one of her sketches is found deficient in some new way. Rebel imagery crops up in some of those sketches as Francesca becomes more frustrated by her gilded cage, and she evades her armed government minder more and more often. She also comes to know that minder better on a personal level along the way; her frustration in being guarded by him is mirrored by his frustration in how she makes his work harder by sneaking away. And this regime is not kind to people who fail it , whether that failure is related to making art or guarding artists.

It all ends in violence and destruction, as always happens in a repressive regime: violence is the tool those regimes know best, and the best tool their enemies have against them.

James Albon tells this story calmly, straightforwardly, in watercolors highlighted by bright, almost day-glo colors on darker backgrounds – Francesca’s blonde hair in particular pops in every panel she appears. His lettering is organic, the slightest bit rough, an unexpected touch for a book so driven by dialogue. His camera flies in and out from panel to panel, to share focus between the architecture and the people: both are equally important here.

It comes across something like a historical document: A Shining Beacon reads a bit like the chronicles of something that happened, not that long ago, in a nation not far away from our own. There is an inevitability to all of its plot twists; this is how it all had to happen, and how it would always happen.

It is both not a political book and deeply a political book. It makes no specific points, and never names the ideology of the regime. But then, regimes like this have the same core ideology anyway, no matter what their public statements say. It’s all about holding onto power, nothing more. Albon, I think, would not characterize it as a warning about anything: that’s not what A Shining Beacon does. It is a story, about one person in an impossible situation, and how she tries to navigate it and eventually sees how impossible it always was.

It does that very well. It may have lessons for those who engage deeply with it. And it may have warnings to those of us who see aspects of Albon’s fictional regime in our own nations.