Broken Frontier

The first storyarc of Americanime’s lynchpin title Katharsis is collected in graphic novel format, including new pages, reworked art and dialogue, plus the never before published fourth issue!  Broken Frontier poured through its pages…

Katharsis, by Americanime CEO Michael Westerman and new artist sensation Xerx Javier, was originally written as a screenplay treatment that combined everything Westerman loved about anime and mixed it with more American action and horror film sensibilities.  But shortly after its completion, the writer found that this story was a natural fit for a different, perhaps more apposite medium—comics.

To briefly summarize, the story of Katharsis takes place during the dying days of an alternate World War II, one in which the Third Reich is winning, advancing, on the verge of victory, and only the USSR still maintains a solid (though guerilla) resistance.  Yet, the conflict is not so cut-and-dry: the Reich’s occult weapon of triumph, the Blitzkrieg, an unstoppable superhuman born of the black arts and kept controlled by way of allowing him the continual mass slaughter of the Reich’s enemies, has suddenly turned against his once-masters, deciding that there is more blood to be had in fighting the one, true remaining army.  As the German body count rises, and the Russian resistance is battered on all sides by a desperate Reich, the remaining players amass for a final reckoning.  But all is not as it seems…

Perhaps the most enthralling part of Katharsis is that, in a move I wouldn’t attribute to the synopsis above, its basic approach is ridiculously straight-forward—it’s a whole bunch of butt-kicking action!  Seriously, hardly a page goes by where someone isn’t getting diced, blown up, stabbed, mutilated, shot, or gouged.  Even better, the action leans toward the over-the-top choreographed style, so it’s as beautiful to look at as it is fun to decipher, if you’re into that kind of thing, anyway.  Neither the writer nor the artist pulls any punches in the relegation of gore or creative-killings, and they leave readers with a book that could satisfy even the most bottomless of crazy-violence cravings.

Even better—for those of us who do, in the end, want more than mere empty action—the plot, characters, and motifs of Katharsis are complex and challenging to the extreme.  For anyone who dared to decipher Joe Kelly’s and Chris Bacchalo’s enigmatic Steampunk series, Katharsis will be a similar kind of trip: a simple story buried beneath a multifaceted world, and one in which the writer never slows down to make it uncomplicated.  Characters never speak as if they’re expositing, and actions can only ever be explained and fitted into the puzzle of the plot if the reader slows for a close look (an act that feels unintuitive when reading a seemingly fast-paced action story) and puts the pieces together for himself.  Everything needed is there: this isn’t an experimental work that’s not meant to be understood, but Westerman never for a moment considers his audience isn’t as quick-witted and eagle-eyed as he expects them to be.

When I read the original first three issues of the quarterly series, there were odd moments I simply couldn’t discern, not even by going back and studying the previously published material,  but all of these hindrances are patched up nicely by the reworked dialogue and additional pages of art that were added to the final graphic novel.  Additionally, the never-before-published fourth issue, which concludes the first “Act” of the epic, is included in its entirety, and by the end of the book, the only questions left are those which readers are distinctly not yet meant to know. They’ve got to save something to bring folks back for Volume 2, don’t they?!

As for the art by Javier, prepare for a feast.  As Katharsis was Xerx’s first regular comic, his art improves and evolves throughout the unraveling of the four chapters.  He begins as a very dark and sketchy hybrid of Sam Kieth and Rob Liefeld, with both fluid and heavy blocks of shadow ladled over strong, imposing figures and backgrounds.  Eventually, by the final chapter, Xerx’s work transforms into a sort of gothic Mark Buckingham (of Fables, and Shade the Changing Man fame), with sharp, perfectly rendered backgrounds, and softer, more dynamic characters and action.  Either way, Javier’s work is a wonder to behold; I fell in love with the earlier and in retrospect clunkier work of issue #1, held enrapt by its black grandeur and excessively graphic violence, and can hardly believe how polished the visuals became by the last pages of the four-chapter GN!

Katharsis Volume 1 kicks off Americanime’s “graphic novel” phase, wherein all the previously published material of the company’s parent titles are getting the full collection treatment.  Katharsis is the first, though its packaging is paradigmatic, a perfect example of what readers can expect in the future.  Extra pages, reworked art and dialogue, and bonus issues that never saw the light of day as individual publications—altogether the final packaging makes for a polished product that old readers of the individual books will find a worthwhile improvement upon the originals, and new readers will now be able to read the entire opening storyarcs in unexpurgated and finalized form.

Quickly following Katharsis will be a collection of Westerman’s Bounty Killer (a bounty hunter in the 1800’s who has a preordained, fated meeting with a powerful figure of folk legend called “The Red Man”) and Honor of the Damned (the humor-action book by Nevin Arnold about a zombie samurai and the ten-year-old boy who becomes his master).  Seriously, I can’t recommend any of these books enough, and you can find reviews written for all of the individual issues here at Broken Frontier!

As I mentioned before, Steampunk is perhaps the closest match to an already existent, published material that Katharsis can be compared to.  Penny Farthing Press’ The Victorian is another similarly-executed title, matching the style of narrative that becomes increasingly absorbing precisely due to its unorthodox complexity.  Again, though, Katharsis maintains the conceit of being (at the surface-level) a complete action-fest, and in all my years of comic book collecting I’ve never yet come across a work as visceral and oddball, as satisfying to my artistic aesthete side as it is to my boo-yah child-inside side.  Bloody, violent, mesmerizing, extreme, unprecedented, and utterly original, Katharsis Volume 1 is everything a good catharsis should be: an eruption of individuality that has to be seen to be believed.

Katharsis Volume 1 will soon be available for national release, so go to your local retailer now and let them know you want a copy set aside.  And if you just can’t wait, the GN will be available first at the Americanime online shop, located at www.americanimeproductions.com.