Review: The Mire

Live After Death

 

The Mire holds mysteries; skeletons so shrouded and secrets so subtle that when artist, author and auteur Becky Cloonan at last pulls back the pall, she reveals human frailty, its folly and how love endures even after death. The Mire would make Edgar Allan Poe shake with envy and weep with joy.

 

Where Wolves, Cloonan's previous mini-comic, relies on an austere economy of language, she dresses The Mire in a finery of words and letters, vows and curses. There is always someone (or something) with a question to ask, an order to give or a tale to tell. What gets said (and read) allows one more tumbler to fall into place and brings another terrible truth to light. Cloonan's canniness appears in the title; The Mire hangs heavy with consequences and relies on allusion, elusion and illusion to tell a unique tale.      

Cloonan locates The Mire around a simple plot: a knight, Sir Owain, on the eve of battle, tasks his squire, Aiden, to brave the ''withering swamp'' and deliver a letter, post-haste, to Castle Ironwood. A portion of the Poe-ness present in The Mire comes from how Cloonan builds suspense through texts. Like Poe's unnamed narrators who write or receive letters, the act of correspondence animates this story and gives Cloonan the freedom to play with text and image on myriad levels.  

Once Aiden sets out there is a (near) imperceptible change in how the narrative is told. This kind of delicate touch demonstrates Cloonan's command as a storyteller and comic book artist. Either by coincidence, convenience or in deference to her muses -- Cloonan's artfulness pulls off the trifecta -- a particular species of bird appears to act as an avian usher when Aiden enters the swamp. This same bird remains a presence in the story, a feathered Virgil on vigil.

 

Ink defines Becky Cloonan as an artist. The first panel proper (an opening page shows Sir Owain in reverie before his worktable) is of fingers, pen, paper and ink pot -- Cloonan must have smiled when she came up with that idea. Hair and bare branches, armor and eye sockets, cloaks and bed curtains, all appear rich, deep and dark, ink is Cloonan's true signature; a landscape of silhouettes and soulful lines.

 

Cloonan drapes The Mire in curtains. Characters act as showmen pulling back blinds and parting canvas walls to reveal an in-between world, half-open and half-obscured -- a setting, again, where Roderick Usher or Ligeia would feel at home. Cloonan's men, women and children all brood beneath a foreground of tousled brows suffuse with secrets. The atmosphere may be furtive, the motifs enigmatic, but at its nucleus, The Mire is a romance and at her heart, Cloonan is a literary and classic romantic.

       

The reader who troubles The Mire wades into moralities murky and consequences clear, a tale both sad and wise and a work of passion, craft and smarts. Becky Cloonan knows how to wound with words and kill with pictures -- a singular talent of pen and prose.

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The Mire, Wolves and something called a Manticore Tote of Holding are all available at http://beckycloonan.bigcartel.com/

Review: Wolves

Haunt of the Hunt

... of arrivals and departures that allow for interpretation as its own merit. Becky Cloonan’s Wolves contains only sixteen spoken words; and yet it is as rich and deep as the nighttime world in which it is set.  Comic book readers rail against overdone exposition (often through dialogue) that serves only to signpost the mundane and redundant while decreasing the potency of the visuals; not so with Wolves. Cloonan animates an ingenuous plot with the protagonist’s possessed thoughts – imaginings that roil in ambiguity, although not for the sake of it – and lets the art speak for itself in stark (and literal) black and white. The straw man argument says that Cloonan is an artist first and a writer second, so it’s no surprise, no coincidence that the script is spare and the dialogue sparse; however it’s the words in Wolves that construct the puzzle box of the story’s many layers, it’s the words and thoughts of the characters (and not the deeds) that conspire to occlude and offset Cloonan’s fierce illustrations – a symmetrical dialectic of text and image. Set in a medieval milieu, this is a tale of hunted and haunted hunter. There is a woman; who she is (what she is?) appears uncomplicated, but love (and Wolves) is never so simple. Her presence is one of the story’s mysteries – she seems more than the obedient spouse or the object of courtly intrigue; her role may be distinct, but she is not. Perhaps, she is what she appears to be, an enigma. The unnamed protagonist is charged with a task that is familiar and uncanny at the same time; the less said the better.

  Cloonan’s art excels as those who know her work in the similar environs of Northlanders and the more recent Conan The Barbarian can attest. Landscapes look cinematic and characters are composed within the frame as to provide dimension and depth to each panel. On a side note, Cloonan corners the market on sketching weariness in both man and beast; her viatae should say, ‘draws sad horses well.’ Dialogue is at a premium, but Cloonan adds sound effects like ‘sklish’ for splashing water, and battle sounds such as ‘shik,’ and ‘gshh’ that inform this silent interlude with real verve.

   Binaries imbue Wolves with their tension; exits and entrances are evident on almost each page. ‘Open the Gates!’ commands a castle guard. These are the first words that any of the characters actually speak out loud; and the fact that they are spoken by a ‘gatekeeper’ adds to Cloonan’s cleverness as a writer. On one hand the order is clear: a call produces a response, the gate is opened and the hunter is allowed to pass through. On the other hand, it’s all metaphor, an exchange, a quid pro quo that prizes the meaning of opposite actions eternally bound; ever unbreakable and perpetually unchangeable. Wolves tracks in the elliptical dreamscape of memory; an attempt to parse meaning from the scattered footfalls of love, loss, duty, and dignity; an open-ending

Wolves is available for $6 (incl. shipping) at Becky Cloonan's website http://beckycloonan.bigcartel.com/