Broken Frontier

Tale as old as time: artist working as a professional in the field (in this case animation),  reaches peak of creative frustration, seeks to produce a product artistically under his control, and so naturally turns to self-published comics.  Refurbishing his favorite ideas culled from an earlier, more casually self-made work (in this case, a comic called Eclectic Café ), artist gets to work on producing his first honest-to-goodness masterpiece.

Masterpiece receives all due critical recognition, winning a Xeric Grant in the year 2000 and managing a steady seven-issue run, all carried by Diamond Distributors, all heralded by fans and industry pros alike, until, as with most self-published gems, life puts a kibosh on artist’s financial situation.  Self-published comic gets shelved.  Artist continues to work in animation.  Artist continues to draw comic, though no longer published.  For years, nothing more is heard.

Then: artists gets second chance in the form of a Prince Edward Island grant to finish book.  Artist prints 100 copies and sends them to publisher and professional alike.  Publishers proceed to lose all copies in the mail.  Professionals read the work and rave about it online, including one particularly persuasive professional named Dave Sim.  Sim’s online hurrahs  catch the attention of IDW’s President, Ted Adams, who asks artist to send him a copy, as he never got the chance to read the last copy, as it was lost in the mail.  Adams enjoys book very much.  Artist get work published by IDW, a big enough name in publishing that now articles like this are written about it.

The work and the bona fide artiste in question?

Chiaroscuro: Patchwork Book I by Troy Little, recently released as a hardcover GN by IDW, and oh what a thing it is.  Taking hints from Sim’s own Cerebus, Sam Kieth’s The Maxx, and mixing in visual shades of Mike Mignola and Troy Nixey to boot, it’s hard not to fall hard for Little’s not-so-little opus.  Following the exploits of a would-be artist named Steven Patch, a man who squats within an abandoned apartment, a man who sits within an oversized chair and faces a perfectly blank canvas day in and day out, a man completely useless to both himself and others and yet keenly critical to all comers, Chiaroscuro manages to be a book brimming with brilliant new avenues for attacking the ever-present tedium of the Generation X mentality.

Which isn’t to say Chiaroscuro is a story about “nothing” a la Seinfeld.  Rather, it’s about nearly everything, and manages to winnow its focus down only by the grace of a care-for-nothing protagonist.  Steven Patch works valiantly to avoid life as a whole, but via a series of Kafka-esque twists, he finds himself confronted with a far more involved palate than he can duly deal with.  Tough guys in trench coats ambush Steven in his apartment, challenge his claim as an artist due to a freakish case of mistaken identity. 

In counterpoint, old friends with the right contacts re-enter Steven’s life, and offer him the ultimate temptation: to be a patronized, working, co-opted artist.  Add to that an utterly charming though intriguingly bizarre new romance, marvelously naturalistic dialogue, an organic pace to the proceedings, and shocking, wholly unforeseen moments that leave the reader breathless, Steven’s story is a comic book experience no one who loves the medium can afford to dismiss.

Little is an auteur with an obvious range of influences, and Chiaroscuro has been held up next to such comic book legends as Will Eisner himself.  The joy of reading the book, however, lies in the work’s distinctive voice, which takes all that the independent trailblazers of the past few decades have exemplified and mixes it with a staunchly more contemporary vibe, a style and panache encompassing a culture saturated in world cinema, animation, and slice-of-life graphic works such as Craig Thompson’s Blankets and high-energy riffs on the same such as Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim.

Though it isn’t just the ability to compare Chiaroscuro that sets it apart (in fact, that would do just the opposite): Little’s storytelling is bar none, both in its scripting and visuals.  The characters are given a wealth of expression and honest voice, the mundane scenes stand as dynamically derived as the more fantastical and surreal pages of nearly inexplicable event.  The story is simple and yet so intricately wrought, that it’s a vastly more difficult thing to describe than it is to experience, which may just be the way of any truly great story.

Chiaroscuro: Patchwork Book I was released this November, collecting the seven previously published issues plus three never-before-seen chapters.  Little is hard at work on Book II (a surmised three to five volumes completing the work in full), though in the interim, there’ll be a (according to Little) “very different from Chiaroscuro” short graphic novel called Angora Napkin.  Look for it and future volumes of Patchwork at Little’s website, IDW’s site, and definitely race to purchase a copy of the first GN from either of those storefronts or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  Just be ready to love a comic more than life itself, because that’s the most likely outcome of consuming the 234 pages of Book I.

You can even support your local comic shop and hand them the Diamond order code (AUG073757).  It’s a more than worthwhile expenditure, and luckily, it’s IDW’s first modestly priced release, at only $24.99 for a hardcover copy compilation twice the length of any Vertigo, DC, or Marvel book of equal price and high-quality format.

Okay, praise from me is only gonna get the book so far.  So get up off your keister and read the damn thing and start smearing the internet with your own!