Chronic Guest Review: Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes!

And now, may I present the Honorable Miracle Keith, who will be reviewing a very froofy text whilst engaging in as little actual froofery as possible.....

Review of Dotter Of Her Father’s Eyes

By Bryan & Mary Talbot

Published by Dark Horse

     There’s been a nearly endless amount of academic papers, biographies and even entire college courses devoted to author James Joyce; heck, my wife took a course covering just one book (Ulysees) and though she got a lot of enjoyment out of it, the book is so densely packed with ideas/allusions/cultural idioms that nobody can fully understand it but Joyce himself, and he’s kinda dead.  In this review, I’m not going to pretend like I’m some expert on Joyce (far from it).  I’m just going to bring you my reaction with the understanding that I’m a woefully uneducated, underachieving fan of the graphic novel art form.

   

  The book delivers the parallel stories of Mary Atherton/Lucia Joyce, both daughters of highly regarded but difficult men.  Joyce is raised in the shadow of her father’s literary fame during the roaring 1920s/30s in Europe, while Atherton is raised in middle class Britain of the ‘50s/’60s.  The book opens with Mar’s seemingly innocuous discovery of an old passport photo, setting up the framing sequence and beginning the tales of two iives in flashback.  In Mary’s case, her father was renowned Joycean scholar James Atherton, an Englishman who rules over his daughter’s life with an iron hand.  A perfectionist who dictates his daughter’s every academic step, his brief displays of affection are entirely conditional; her very existence seems to annoy and anger him.  The Joyce family is modestly wealthy but itinerant.  Lucia falls in love with dancing as a little girl, but James Joyce is an easily distracted, somewhat indifferent father and his wife Nora is an emotionally abusive mother, who vocally dislikes her daughter’s greatest dreams of becoming a professional dancer/dance instructor.

   

  The artwork changes as the story jumps from Mary’s life to Lucia’s – the former is done in Talbot’s beautiful, modestly detailed style;  lightly colored, elegant drawings that add a deeper layer of tragedy to the more violent scenes of child abuse.  Lucia’s life is illustrated in deep blue-washed ink and watercolor; an appropriate contrast between the biographical/autobiographical stories (and by the time Lucia’s story concludes, the color blue seems most appropriate -those who know about Lucia’s fate can attest).

     If I have one complaint about this book, it’s fairly small: the dialogue spoken by the Joyce family is sometimes over-expository.  Obviously, there’s a great deal of historical record about what Joyce did and his novels are still in print; however, the way his daughter spoke is not documented, so the writer (Mary) is left to make up her dialogue with a “best guess”, which unfortunately contains a lot of gems like:

Lucia:  Margaret Morris is on at the Comedie!  Oh, Babbo, let’s go and see her!

James Joyce:  Oh, you mean William Morris’s granddaughter?  Didn’t she marry a Scotsman?  That Fauvist fellow I used to know, Fergusson.

Lucia:  How should I know?  She’s an expressive dancer – she’s famous!

Yikes.  There’s no easy way to get around that dilemma, and it ends up being this book’s only flaw.  The scenes with Mary and her father are excellent, brief scenes of tension and sometimes terror, as she negotiates her life under the control of her asshole father.

 Talbot is a highly underrated illustrator in the comics industry, though he has worked on high profile titles like Sandman and Fables.  I would personally recommend his graphic novel The Tale of One Bad Rat (also published by Dark Horse), with the caution that its plot does involve child sexual abuse (no graphic depcitions, but still…).

All in all, this is a recommended work for those who need a break from the tights n’ capes variety of story.  An excellent reminder of the power of the comic book medium and an emotionally charged examination of what it means to live with both an artist of great insight into the human condition (but woefully little compassion for the real people in his life) and an academic who writes critically lauded analysis of said artist’s works (also unable to love unconditionally).

- Miracle Keith

Chronic Review: Kult # 1!

Kult # 1 (of 4)

Dark Horse Comics

Script:     Jeremy Barlow

Pencils:   Iwan Nazif

20 pages for $3.50

Kult is not a new thing, it started out as a role playing game created by some mad Swedish bastard, Gunilla Jonsson.  I remember being instantly attracted to the tagline - "Death Is Only The Beginning"....fuck n' a right, man!

Original Kult RPG

The Kult world is a dark, dark world in the nihilistic mold of an H.P. Lovecraft.  In the Kult cosmology, people are at best an afterthought in the universe, and outside of that, a nuisance to be stomped out with impunity.  There's no humanistic "special snowflake" thinking involved, nor any conventional religious optimism of things working out for the better in the end.  For Kult, we live in a sham of world where God is dead, and everything else across the veil is pissed off and not terribly fond of us.  This is my kind of narrative landscape, folks.

I mention this for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, to give a sense of story ambiance, and secondly because a good chunk of the lucky few who might stumble upon Kult and discount it unfairly.  I think a lot of readers will pick up on the fact that there's a malevolent sham of a world looking for a new savior and say "Hey!  I've seen this before in The Invisibles and The Matrix!  What a rip!"  But actually Kult got there first, so I wouldn't penalize it for that.  Just sayin'.

Now I've got a red pill, and a blue pill...

So, back to the book at hand.  The original tagline for Millar's Nemesis was "What if Batman was a cunt?"  The tagline for this Kult series should be - "What if Neo was a cunt?"  The story is centered around Tomas Zenk, a potential replacement for the deceased almighty.  Naturally there are lots of monstrous things looking to squelch that action, and an enlightened few that are looking for a way out of the endless cycle of pain and misery.  As backdrops go, it's pretty epic.

I like the world, and I think if Dark Horse could have snagged Warren Ellis for the project, we might really have something special on our hands.  As it stands in the hands of Jeremy Barlow, there's nothing broken about it, but nothing really pops on the page, either.

The gist of the story is that Tomas Zenk is your typical "in over his head" would be savior of the world.  He's kind of a dick, and he's kind of a loser, and his job as a parole officer spins him toward an awakening to the larger Kult reality.  There's plenty of evil Cthulhian monster action to be had, and a small group of rebels who ex machina onto the scene to help out, and eventually activate the Godhood inside the man.

I don't actually consider it a mistake to make Tomas Zenk unlikeable.  The problem is that he's unexceptional.  If you're going to make him a prick, do it with some aggression and panache.  If he's going to be "The One", there ought to be something about him that draws interest, and there's nothing like that about Zenk.  He's just kind of there, being a parole officer with child custody issues.

I'm probably being unfair to Kult because I read it directly after finishing the Secret Six finale, and ahhh... that's a tough act to follow.  After you get done reading Gail Simone's characters spout off one Shakespearean gem after another, (Bane:  "I'm bound for hell, I will not enter it as a comedy") it's difficult to be impacted by an extra dimensional force that pulls a Macauley Culkin face slap and says "No--You cannot halt the machine!"  It just lays flat.  I mean, it does get more clever than that. There was a bit from the same demon a few pages earlier about tasting ashes on tongues and such.  A book like this really needs to sell the idea that its giving you dark poetry from an alien perspective to pay off, though.  For me, there are kinks to work out yet.

So here's what I'll say about Kult.  I'm not in love with any of the characters, but in spite of everything I've said so far, understand that I'm very much interested in the Kult world.  I saw enough on the page here that I'm certainly going to continue with it.  I don't know if Barlow is actually the guy for this, but then again, I don't know that he's not.  I'm going to let the thing run its course a bit before I declare that he's not up to the task 

I would say that if you're into painfully dark world views, or Lovecraft, or even just monster stories, Kult is certainly worth a test drive.

- Ryan

Yeah....what he said.