Michael DeForge's Cave Adventure is a fun fantasy comic that reminds me of Ron Rege's whimsical line work and strange characters (see Skibber Bee Bye) mixed with a Dungeons & Dragons crawl by way of Mat Brinkman.

It opens with a three panel prelude that seems to indicate the rest of the story (so far) is all a comic within the comic given by a guy—who looks like a stick figure with head shaped like a soft serve ice cream — to a girl he likes named Cindy. He calls its "an independent comic book about my feelings," which adds an interesting level of metaphor to the story as a whole, as we must read the story not only as an "adventure" but as an expression of feelings. At this point in the serialization, 19 pages, there are few indicators for this secondary reading. Cindy's likeness makes a single panel appearance in a though balloon as the protagonist, who we later learn is named "Washington Smalls," crawls through a cavern passage.

Washington enters the "Marshmallow Cavern" to find his parents, who were kidnapped one night by a "mountain man." He quickly begins meeting strange creatures and picking up various objects. In the tradition of all such adventures, his first acquisition is a magic sword pulled off a skeleton. He gets into a fight, learns about some monsters, and gains more treasure. DeForge is clearly playing up the intertextual borrowings from role-playing games. Washington's magical fanny pack is what in D&D was the "bag of holding", and in the style of almost every such game, DeForge pops-up a narrative box to show us Washington's "inventory" of items.

DeForge's character designs are a big draw of the comic. They are anthropomorphic but only barely so. Many of the characters are blobs, rounded rectangles, jagged edged quadrilaterals, worms, or indescribable shapes. Only a few look mostly like people, the ogres for instance. These designs combined with the simple and light line work as well as the slightly ironic/humorous take on the fantasy dungeon crawl makes for an appealing and fun comic that doesn't take itself too seriously.

The pages are layed out in landscape format, usually with two tiers of panels. The horizontal format works with the forward movement of Washington as he moves through the caves. DeForge can string together a longer chain of panels to emphasize movement into the caves. He breaks out of the two tier template in some cases to emphasize height and size, such as the case where Washington is learning about some monsters he just fought. By taking up the full height of the page the monsters becomes larger than life (literally, since Washington has already killed them in a page of smaller panels). Similarly, a single tier page is used to emphasize vertical movement.

The comic is drawn in black and pale blue (which is one of my favorite color schemes in comics (think Ghost World)), but DeForge also makes use of the white negative space as another color. By cutting out a blue field with a white line, he can create a second level of depth (backgrounds of mountains or cave walls) or reality (thought balloon images, stories within the stories) or just change the focus of a panel.

DeForge promises more episodes, I look forward to seeing where Cave Adventure goes.

The style of Jed McGowan's Ritual of the Savage is what attracts me to this complete 37 page comic.

McGowan uses a number of pastels (pink, orange, and yellow) in combination with a more naturalistic palette of brown, green, and blue. These colors make frequent appearances as shapes for sound effects or abstract backgrounds that add a certain lively oddity to the work.

The story starts in media res with the protagonist out of breath in the jungle. The man looks poorly dressed for a jungle adventure, wearing a rather plain shirt, pants, and shoes. We never learn why he is in the jungle or what he is running from, at first, but the ending of the story loops us back to the beginning in a way that creates a sense of repetition and variation.

The protagonist is quickly involved with a group of natives who, after shooting him with an arrow, seem to be treating him well, though the implications of the "ritual"—which we never see—is left open, possibly threatening. McGowan does well in conveying anxiety throughout the story without a great deal of overt threats. The protagonist is anxious to escape and the reader feels this too, adding a layer of menace beneath the "savage's" acts.

Similar to Cave Adventure, Ritual of the Savage draws on a well of pre-existing narratives, though less overt in playing with those sources. The anxiety in the story is, perhaps, more a result of existing notions of the "civilized man captured by savages" meta-narrative than in anything specifically displayed in the story. In one scene, the protagonist tries to kiss the native woman who captured him. She mentions a previous visitor who taught her English and says, "you are not completely unlike him." Perhaps a nod to previous and similar narratives that are not completely unlike this one.

McGowan does not use panel borders and makes frequent use of full page images. When using multiple panels, he drops out backgrounds, making do with the occasional pale color field behind one or two of the panels on the page. In a rare example of making use of the comic's web publication, McGowan expands the size of his page to double its normal width at a few key moments. Early on he moves from a two panel page of the protagonist sitting on a rock to a double wide page showing the jungle with the protagonist on one side and the surprise appearance of the native women, bow drawn, on the other side.

Another impressive page is the following one where the protagonist is hit by an arrow. McGowan shows him as a silhouetted form of pink on a yellow ground. The colors, which normally would be rather garish, convey the shock of the moment in a very attractive way.

In general, McGowan's loose drawing style with its mostly unvariegated thin lines is pleasing, despite the stiffness of the characters. The images look slightly tossed off, which provides a nice verve of immediacy to counter that stiffness.

While you're over there looking at these comics, take a look at some of the other offerings at Top Shelf 2.0. I'd highly recommend Dash Shaw's The Bottle. Shaw always offers interesting stories in an experimental style and this is no exception. Jeff Zwirak's Burning Building Comix has an interesting narrato-visual layout but reading it is not ideally suited to the page by page presentation (it would be really great as an accordion folded book). Shannon Gerard's Unspent Love is a series of well drawn shorts that have a poetic brevity.

[Originally published at: http://comixtalk.com/panels_pictures_cave_and_jungle]

Back in 1974, long after the disappearance of EC and shortly after the heyday of the underground comix, the direct comics market was just developing. Marvel and DC really were the only games in town, and into this arena the first issue of Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom was published by Bud Plant. At the time, Star*Reach, a science fiction and fantasy anthology, was the only other independent comic being published (the first issue having come out earlier that year), preceeding both Sim’s Cerebus and Pekar’s American Splendor by a few years. Katz envisioned the book as a single novel. He put out a new issue about every six months, ending the story with issue 24 in 1986.

Century Comics Group (though this book was published under its former name Mecca) is now releasing The First Kingdom in four volumes, each containing six of the original issues. As of this writing, the second volume is forthcoming, with the third being solicited.

To try to briefly summarize the story of even this quarter of The First Kingdom is futile. Katz created one of the densest comics I’ve ever read both in content and visuals. The beginning introduces us to the idea of a man made cataclysm that altered the Earth and left behind a few survivors, robbed of all civilization. The protagonist for the early issues is Darkenmoor a hunter who loses his tribe and begins his path along a tragic fate, foretold early on by an old seer. His path is quickly crossed by a group of “gods,” who live in a civilization atop high mountains. Darkenmoor gathers other people, fights monsters, and founds a city-state. The jealousy of his brother-in-law and a fallen god work against him, while a goddess attempts to work in his favor. His son is born and must be hidden away on an island, while the brother-in-law takes control of the city-state. And that’s just the really broad elements (without giving away too much).

One would not go off course to think of Greek myth, epics, and tragedies. Katz’s story runs very clearly in the same vein as ancient Greek literary works. Like the epic of the Iliad, he tells his story with a large cast of characters and jumps about between characters, scenes, and times, focusing more on the bigger picture than any single character. Like an ancient tragedy, characters and gods interact and fight against their unbeatable fates which invariable bring death. Like the Greek myths, the gods display human emotions and pettiness. Like these works, Katz’s story has a didactic core (that is not yet clear in this quarter).

For these reasons, the comic is not a simple sword and sorcery tale, though at first it certainly seems like one. Katz’s story is an epic on many levels, spanning (even in this volume) centuries. As such it often forsakes smaller scenes in favor of large events, foregoes much characterization in favor of showing the larger place of characters in the story.

Narration is a large part of The First Kingdom. Nary a panel passes that is not narrated. In some cases it is a tired redundancy of telling us what the images are already showing, but in most cases it is necessary for the leaps of time involved in a great many of the panel transitions. Oddly, Katz uses typeset text exclusively in the comic. All narration and dialogue is set in a rather boring typewriter font on a white background with no borders. The dialogue is not put in any balloons, just set above the characters’ heads, usually at the top of the panel, which visually mixes it with the narration. That said, I never had trouble differentiating the two when reading. Only after reading the whole book did I realize that the narration is in all caps and the dialogue is not.

The sheer amount of text is not the only element that creates the visual density of Katz’s pages. His page layouts neglect the use of gutters. All the panels are divided from each other by a single shared border, as if he had no space to spare in cramming panels onto each page. Early on he puts a lot more panels onto a page, often causing confusing as to the sequence of reading, but by the end the panels are larger and clearly organized. There is no use of any recognizable grid, Katz seems to come to each panel deciding its size without regard to any preconceived layout.

A typical crowded panel (one-third of a page). Click for larger.

Within these crowded together panels, Katz’s art adds even more density to the page. He uses a great quantity of lines to fill the panels, crowding in characters, background, and all manner of creatures. One of his panels holds the amount of lines and visual information that most whole comics pages lack. The lack of color or even much use of spot blacks creates a visually uniformity across these crowded pages that requires attention. The attention is worthwhile, as Katz’s art is impressive if often grotesque.

Another crowded panel featuring some of Katz’s monstrous creations (one-third of a page). Click for larger.

The human figure is a particular focus of Katz. The comic is filled with figures, hardly a panel lacks one and often contains dozens. The denizens of this post-cataclysmic land do suffer a certain uniformity of stature: muscular yet bone thin. Clothing too seems to have been a victim of the changing Earth. Most of the characters go about naked or nearly so, though not in a sword and sorcery chainmail bikini way. Rather, the figures lack the blatant eroticism of most fantasy art, and are more often than not slightly grotesque in shape.

When I started reading the book I was quite put off by the story and art, but I stuck with it, plowing my way through the text and images, becoming more immersed in the story and its world. Katz weaves together a number of storylines, cutting back and forth between different characters with great frequency. At first, I was often hardpressed to differentiate the characters and keep track of the goings-on, but by the end I not only understood what was happening, I wanted to find out more.

I can’t imagine where Katz took his story (though some images I’ve seen indicate the book becomes more science fictiony), but I’m curious to find out. It’s clear that he had a seriousness of purpose and a plan. He wasn’t just making it up as he went along. Even as early as page six, Darkenmoor is granted a vision of his fate. The panel showing this vision has a number of scenes that we see come to pass over the course the following issues.

Century’s reprinting of the comic often suffers from a graying of the art. The blacks are not quite black enough and the whites are often a little grey. Hopefully this will be rectified in the next books, I didn’t find it too hard to fix when scanning the samples above.

I’m not aware of any comic like The First Kingdom. As it began so it remains, standing alone, with few peers.

Bone has been getting a lot of praise and attention for a number of years now. I started reading it back in the beginning and then stopped, as I realized I might as well just wait for the collected books. Years later there is one book for the whole series. It is massive, over 1300 pages, possibly the largest single comic ever published. Currently it is also being republished in a colorized version by Scholastic Books (which tells you it’s being directed at children).

Some literature for children can certainly be seen as for the adult reader too (for instance Alice in Wonderland) though in many cases only on a simple entertainment level (those books about the kid wizard perhaps). Bone is a fantasy adventure story about three “Bones”–odd, big-nosed creatures that look like a Disney character shorn of any recognizable animal identity, a kind of base-level cartoon model. The Bone cousins are run out of their home and end up in a valley where humans, rat creatures (having very little similarities to actual rats), dragons, and various talking animals live. A pretty basic fantasy scenario follows with hidden princesses, talkative bad guys, dark menacing forces, wars, secret powers, hidden dungeons, etc. And of course the happy ending.

Is it for adults? Hard to say. It’s an enjoyable read. I plowed through the 1300 pages wanting to know what happens next, but in the end I felt let down by a lot of it. Like much children’s literature everything resolved too easily without any real consequences, and far too many fantasy tropes were used, unaltered and uninterestingly. For instance much is made by way of the character’s talk of dreams and a mysterious dream power, yet, in the end nothing really comes of it.

The main “bad guys” seem intelligent (they talk) and some of them are even given some personality and even friendliness, yet for the most part they remain faceless voiceless hordes to kill and be killed. While there is evidence that they are not inherently evil (courtesy of the differentiated ones), the implication is never investigated and they remain one dimensional.

Smith’s art is cartoony and obviously influenced by Disney style, which he does extremely well. The drawings are dynamic, well laid-out, and surprisingly consistent over the course of many years’ work. Interestingly I found the drawings most powerful in the night scenes. Larger areas of black and shadow added a power and weight to the work that was otherwise missing (perhaps not so evident if the work were in color). Maybe my whole complaint rests in the lack of these darker areas, visually and thematically.

No question, Bone is an important comics work, but in my mind, it is one for the children, or for adults who want a world where love is simple and chaste, death is rare, and problems are easily solved with a little tenacity and the help of mysterious powers. I don’t have many comics I’d recommend for a child (I don’t know many children anyway), but I’d pass this on to one (though the new color editions would probably delight a bit more as people seem to balk at old black and white).