The Squidder

by Ben Templesmith

I've been a fan of Ben Templesmith's art since he worked with Warren Ellis on Fell (or perhaps sooner, but I can't think of what that would have been), so I was curious to see what the results of his Kickstarter campaign were.  Never one to hide from the weird in the world, Templesmith created the world of The Squidder, and it is a pretty different one at that.

The future of the Squidder is one where the Earth has been taken over by squid-creatures from another dimension.  After years of rule and some weird genetic stuff, humanity is on its last legs.  Our hero, who never gets a name past Squidder, I don't think, is an augmented human, the last survivor of a push to get rid of the invaders.  Many years later, he ekes out a quiet, secretive existence, until the usual stuff happens, and he gets dragged back into the conflict.

I like this story, but I feel like it could have used some more time or space to develop.  I didn't feel like I knew the main character until the back half of the book, and much of what is going on can feel pretty obscure.  At the same time, I appreciate that Templesmith put a great deal of philosophy into this story (it can be read as a fight between collective action and individual thought), and of course, the artwork is phenomenal.  We don't see enough from Templesmith these days...

Ramshackle

by Alison McCreesh

The myth of the North plays big in Canadian consciousness and literature, and it is this curiosity about Northernness, coupled with the fascinatingly detailed watercolour that makes up the cover, that had Ramshackle: A Yellowknife Story calling to me from a table at TCAF.

Alison McCreesh has collected her various comics strips, drawings, and ideas about her and her boyfriend's summer visit to Yellowknife a few years ago.  The pair, freshly graduated and unhurried about settling down, by a beater of a soccer mom minivan, and drive it from Quebec to the Northwest Territories (clear across the country/continent, for the less geographically-inclined), before spending most of a summer living in it in an abandoned field.

McCreesh fits nicely in the Canadian tradition of honest comic memoirists, giving us a clear portrayal of the downsides of her adventure as well as sharing the beauty of the land and the people who live there.  She alternates between grey tone illustrations and rich watercolours, and gives a strong sense of place to this book.

As much as I enjoyed reading about Alison's experiences, I found that I really gravitated towards the parts of the book that dealt with the way in which Yellowknifers have constructed their day-to-day existence in a city just below the Arctic Circle.  Details about the inability to construct sewage or water pipes on solid bedrock, and the subsequent system that has developed around 'honeybuckets' - pails used to collect washroom waste which homeowners have to take to a disposal site themselves, fascinate me.  Likewise, I was very interested to learn about the informal community called the Woodlot, a group of quasi-legal shacks that have become the nexus for a very special part of the city.

McCreesh has done some very good work in this book, which entertained me as much as it informed me.  Recommended.

In Search of Charley Butters

by Zach Worton

I really enjoyed The Disappearance of Charley Butters a year ago, so I was looking forward to getting The Search for Charley Butters. Charley Butters was an obscure and unknown artist who went off to live alone in a shack in the woods in the 1960s and was never seen again.  Travis and his friends (I use that word loosely) discovered the cabin in the first book, and Travis became a little obsessed with Butters's journals.

This book opens a year later, and Travis is not in a good place.  He was squeezed out of the documentary about Butters that his friend Stuart made, his girl left him, and he started spending way too much time drinking and venting to strangers.  Travis gets tossed out of a theatre screening the documentary, and his boss forces him to take a short vacation to pull himself together.

Travis creates a scene on Stuart's doorstep, and then heads back to Butters's cabin, where he discovers a few other things about the artist, and finds himself a little refreshed.

This is very much a middle book.  It advances the plot without introducing much in the way of new story elements, instead focusing on Travis's general disintegration.  Travis is not a likeable character, but Worton's storytelling is compelling, and you find yourself rooting for him a little.  Most interesting is the mystery of what happened to Butters, and who is still living in those woods.

Here's hoping that the next volume will be out at next year's TCAF.

The Resistance

Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti
Art by Juan Santacruz, Francis Portela, Paul Fernandez, and Christopher Shy

I remember when this series first was published at Wildstorm in the early 00s, and deciding not to buy it even though I was, by that point, a fan of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti's collaborations.  I don't remember my reasoning at the time, but have come to recognize that it was probably a mistake, as this is a very good comic.  Although, to be fair, had I just read the first issue, I might not have gone back to it.

The Resistance tells the story of a group of fighters working to free humanity from the GCC, the governmental organization that runs a future where births are strictly rationed, and where Big Brother would look like a benign minor control system.

Our point of view character is Brian, a computer genius and illegal birth, who draws the attention of the GCC when he tries to help his dying grandfather.  He ends up getting help from Surge, the leader of a resistance cell, who brings him on board.  Over the course of this trade paperback, which collects the original eight-issue series, we get to know the other members of the cell, FTP, Version Mary, and others, and watch as they strike a powerful blow against the GCC.  We also get to watch as a compassionate GCC agent is betrayed by his partner and ends up working with the very people he previously saw as enemies.

It's clear that this series was originally intended to be an on-going one.  Gray and Palmiotti lay the groundwork for a lot of future character development, especially with regards to Version Mary, who is the product of a long-lived genetics program, and is the target of a cult, but I guess sales were not there to support the book.  On the last pages, the characters even joke about how, if they were to save the world for democracy, no one would ever be around to see it.

This is a nice looking book, with good work by Juan Santacruz throughout.  I'm not sure how this Wildstorm series ended up at IDW, or if the four or five pages painted by Christopher Shy were included in the original series, since I think of Shy as being IDW's boy.  Either way, this was a solid collection, and I'm glad I picked it up.