Damon
Keen has been editing the consistently impressive New Zealand comic
anthology Faction for the past couple of years now. For the
new “special” issue, High Water, he once again gathers a
diverse group of Kiwi comics creators to tackle a specific topic:
Climate Change.
Thematic
anthologies are a tricky business, I imagine. Go too long and readers
might suffer from theme fatigue; too short and you run the risk of
seeming too narrow in your focus. High Water is kind of like
the Baby Bear in whatever Goldilocks metaphor I might be constructing
here. It's just right.
Still,
another problem inherent in gathering a bunch of creators together to
interpret the same theme is that there arises the inevitable
compulsion to compare each artist's interpretation with the others in
the collection. It makes weaker contributions seem that much weaker,
though it also pushes the truly original and inventive pieces to the
fore.
It
takes careful stewardship to keep balance. Keen has done a pretty
good job of this in High Water.
Contributors
to High Water include Chris
Slane, Christian Pearce, Cory Mathis, Dylan Horrocks, Jonathan King,
Katie O’Neill, Ned Wenlock, Ross Murray, Sarah Laing, Toby Morris,
and Keen himself. It also features additional artwork by Lei Wen, Ant
Sang, and an amazing cover by Tim Gibson.
Each
artist mostly focuses on the after effects of rising oceans due to
climate change. In this future world of water, there is little left
for humanity. What is left, though, is a blank page upon which to
tell great stories.
While
the presentations range from visceral canticles of loss to finger
wagging admonitions about the outcome of doing nothing to satirical
takes on the root causes of the crisis, each piece still speaks to
the core issue. If a change doesn't come soon, a change will be
forced upon us.
I'm
not going to go into all the pieces in this anthology, but I do want
to give a nod to a few that particularly stood out.
First
is Sarah Laing's “After the Floods” – Laing's loose style,
heavily inked and thickly colored, pulls a reader into a story about
the hope that comes in the face of chaos. Pushed against it, the
spirit survives and, in bleak times, we still find a way. There is a
softness around the edges of this story that are result of its focus
on character and possibility.
Katie
O’Neill's contribution, “Below the Waves” is far more elegiac
in tone. Her manga-inspired static panels are weighted by her dark
color palette. There is incredible silence in her pages, mournful in
their beauty. Here, what has been lost due to our inaction is the
focus, and is all the more palpable due to its inherent universal
humanity.
“The
Lotus Eaters” is editor Damon Keen's own contribution to the
anthology. Told in ten pages, nine of which consist of a three
horizontal panel layout and one being a compelling splash page, this
mostly wordless comic acts as a time line starting now and projecting
far into the future. It, too, speaks of the devastation rising oceans
will cause, but it also looks towards a strange kind of hope. In
Keen's vision of the future, the world heals itself once it removes
the toxic effect of humanity from its surface. Bleak and beautiful at
the same time, “The Lotus Eaters” is as immense in its scope as
it is quiet in its message.
Finally,
Ross Murray's four page story “High Water” is just an absolute
thing of beauty. It, too, speaks of a future teeming with ocean life
at the expense of humanity. Hushed, breathtaking in its
draftsmanship, this piece may be the most striking in the collection.
Its communicative power is sweeping and universal. Murray's work here
should be shown to every climate change denier as a counterpoint to
their madness.
It's
good to see an anthology like Faction doing these “special
event” type publications. It's also great to see it getting
political. It's even better that this anthology allows Kiwi comics
creators to reach a wider audience and continue to push the medium
forward, accent its expansiveness, and focus its emotional gravity.
Oh
yea, there's an introduction by Lucy Lawless too!
