Sophie Franz's The Experts: Creepy Feelings & Riveting Read

Creepy

Sophie Franz's The Experts is a riveting comic. An exercise in atmospheric horror ambiance. It is frightening, spectacular and haunting. I've always thought (and said before) that Horror was a combination of moods and moderation, menacing yet restrained. Horror is a balancing act between the untold and the known. Few can do it well. The Experts is not specifically a horror comic, nor is it fully a science fiction comic, it is a bit of both and it combines elements of both genres to tell it's story effortlessly.

The Experts tells the dreadful story of three scientific experts sent to a remote station in a massive body of water studying strange water humanoids. What becomes apparent is that something is not right with the set-up. They are mis-remembering things and losing touch with their superiors. But the set-up is only a part of the larger story. The puzzle is there for the reader to unravel, but almost as if we are provided with pieces from three different puzzles with the same image, the pieces never really fit together.

Franz's mastery of colour is impressive. She uses white space in a number of areas to enhance the story in different ways. Obviously to let the reader focus on the characters and be unencumbered by background details but also and to perhaps an even greater degree, to amplify the feeling of unease inherent to the story. Are there no background details because the characters simply have stopped noticing their existence? The gradients are also superb, setting the tone of unease at the beginning of the comic. Our experts are here to observe, but who's observing whom, and for what purpose. Most impressive is perhaps Franz's ability to capture facial expression. All of her characters are unique and convey different emotions and subtle changes within very well. A striking achievement, especially considering that her characters have no eyes, one of whom is a humanoid fish.

This story would feel like the perfect set-up for a Doctor Who episode. A few scientists are holed up in a distant and remote locale and haunted by bizarre creatures. They're doomed until the Doctor fixes the issue. But there is no saviour in this story, just characters spiraling ever further into oblivion and helplessness. So far one of my favorite reads of 2016. I'll make a point of following Sophie Franz's Tumblr page moving forward. You should too.

Malachi Ward's Ritual Three: Vile Decay: The Erosion of Democracy

The Canadian government recently signed the Trans Pacific Partnership, a massive trade agreement hailed by the current (until October 19^th) Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Hailed by the PM and his party as a milestone of Canadian trade, the focus of the press has been mostly on the impact of the TPP on the Canadian Dairy industry and the Auto Manufacturing industry (and with reason as this appears to be the final nail in the Canadian car industry’s coffin). But little has been said about the massive loss of privacy provisions that are included in the TPP. I didn't think anyone would ever include privacy provisions in a trade deal, but here it is. The TPP features many anti-privacy measures and limits the ability of governments to prevent the safekeeping of sensitive information within their own borders. This means that shortly our provincial and federal governments will no longer be able to require sensitive data to be stored locally (i.e. within it's boundaries and therefore, within it's jurisdiction). Adding to this the Mickey Mouse clause of copyright extension to prevent Disney from losing Mickey Mouse for another 20 years and thus also preventing countless works from being made available costing hundreds of millions more to the public, and you have a strange agreement where the winners are not the Canadian public as mentioned, but a handful of multi-billion dollar companies. 

In addition to this, Canada has recently passed a law that is eerily similar to the U.S Patriot Act in the form of Bill C-51, effectively creating a mass surveillance state with little oversight over what the government is doing with our information. I fear many do not understand the surveillance apparatus being installed around them. We all have this idea of George Orwell's 1984 where the repressive conditions laid out by the State can be seen with cameras everywhere. But the system didn’t place cameras around their house, they’ve placed them directly in their pockets through our smartphones, in our living rooms with our laptops. And we didn't stop it from happening. 

Whenever I think of this destruction of privacy, I think of Malachi Ward’s Ritual #3: Vile Decay. Even more so nowadays with the Canadian federal elections just hours away. In Ritual Three: Vile Decay an older woman recalls to her grandchildren the moment she felt the world went wrong. Using a virtual environment, she recalls her memories of protest, and ultimately how pointless it all felt. I feel like this in many ways; one day I’ll explain to my children that, when these moments happened, we were powerless to stop the slide because we failed to comprehend the severity of what was happening in front of us.

Brilliant rioting scene

The colours used by Ward in Ritual is stunning, his pacing is extraordinary. As the woman recalls her involvement with the riots (in a great crowd seen, rarely seen in comics due to the complexity of staging such panels), she also remembers the aftermath. As she and her friends are talking about what just happened, the conversation drifts towards the mundanity of everyday life. They too are unable to comprehend what is transpiring ahead of them. As they walk back towards their house, the group disperses under the sunrise of a new day. A darker day, where the spark of revolution has failed and the surveillance State prevailed. The brightness of the colours contrast immensely with the grim reality laid out by the world on the page. There are countless imageries of constructions and crumbling, both physical, societal and digital. It's exceptional. A remarkable work of speculative fiction. Much like Ritual Two: The Reverie, Ward finds inspiration in our troubling realities, the loss of a loved one, the loss of our privacy, and he crafts a relevant and affecting comic. I bought this in 2014 and I remember it vividly to this day.

I’m writing this, days before the 2015 Canadian election where the three major parties are fairly close in the polls and we’re unable to predict a clear winner. The only party who seems to understand the brutality of those repressive measures and who's willing to tackle them (The NDP) will be coming in third. It seems that the party who leads the charge on C-51 and caved in on internet surveillance through the TPP (the Conservatives) might win again, or that the party who doesn’t care about the implications of any of those two issues (the Liberals) might also win. I don’t think Canada will be a different country on Monday, but it will certainly be a less open and free country. One teetering ever closer to the dark and gloomy world presented in Ritual Three: Vile Decay. 

Endlessly staring into that abyss

Liam McKenna's Termination Shock: Almost There

Liam McKenna's Termination Shock is a science fiction comic about following the rules so relentlessly that its leads to blindness; the consequences of not questionning your own actions; and the loss of free will that accompanies "blindly" following orders.

Termination Shock tells the story of an officer on board a small freight ship who messes up a shipment by accepting to do an "off the book" favor for a friend. As the small freight ship is loading equipment from a remote unmanned space station, she takes in a load of cargo, but it registers as stolen from the space station and they are shot. They are almost gunned down, but manage to escape. Unfortunately for the officer, the rules and regulations for jeopardizing a mission are clear. The penalty is death and the captain of the ship intends on following the rules. The captain forces the officer to step into a spacesuit and exit the ship to suffocate for her mistake. We follow the aftermath as the remaining crew members realizes the gravity of what happened and the toll this will take on them.

It is unclear what the captain's motivations were for doing what she did. There is no clear sense of who these people are before the incident. All we know is the captain was going to follow the rules, regardless of the objections of her second officer, who warned against so harsh a punishment for such a minor infraction. I was led to believe that she felt it would have jeopardized her authority and her credibility if she had let the mistake slide from her attitude throughout the execution and her discussion with the crew that a life of being a "cold hard captain" got her the rank she desired. Again, this is what I assumed based on the text. If this is really part of the story, or if I simply assumed as much based on the subtextual undertone, I'll let you be the judge of this. In any case, the story struck me as solid, if slightly underdevelopped. I would have preferred to see more of the incident and the aftermath; this is where the drama truly lies, not so much in building up the momentum to it. The story is also constructed in a non-linear manner which I felt removed some of the momentum. 

There are also a few moments where I was unable to tell the tone and story elements based on the visuals. For example, in the third panel on the second page, the doctor is walking nonchalantly towards the captain and they make small talk about beers. He leans casually in the doorway, arms crossed with half a smile. He makes a joke and they laugh. I understood that this was to establish their relationship, but knowing that this takes place after the execution made this sequence feel really odd. On page three, Bird, the officer who was adamantly opposing the captain's decision, is screaming at her that it was all her fault as she made the final call. His fists are raised, but his facial expression is over-emoting and I couldn't tell the tone. I know the character is upset, but it's a bit too over the top, to the point where I thought this comic was going to be a dark comedy. It happens randomly throughout the book where I'm just unsure of what the expressions the characters are trying to convey. 

This being said, apart from these few instances where the images fall short, it's actually well done. The stripped background fit perfectly with the setting of a spaceship. The characters are placed in a grey or dark grey environment, which constantly reinforces the theme (no black or white solutions) of the book. So with all of this said, I can forgive some of the small issues when looking at the comic as a whole. And based on what I've seen from McKenna's Tumblr page, his attention to facial details has improved.

I'll keep an eye on this creator's work. A "P.E.I."....P.E.Eye....He's from Charlottetown...Ok, I'll stop