Broken Frontier

Aaron Lopresti is a known name in comics. Ask any fanboy or girl, any regular joe of the mainstream or popular small press and they’ll immediately nod and name their favorite run he’s done, their admiration for his non-standard yet effortlessly mainstream art, and in many cases they may even name their favorite issue he’s done to date.  But nevertheless, Aaron has yet to trip and fall into that fame-driven cockpit called superstardom; he’s never had a title sold and supported, on the whole, by his name and art alone. Comic readers know Aaron Lopresti, but they don’t know him.  Which makes it all the more interesting that he’s decided to do what only the classically christened “giants” of the industry opt to do: an artbook.

“The idea hit me while I was working on some other paintings during a downtime in my comics career, about seven years ago,” Aaron explains.  “Obviously I’d seen and enjoyed the classic book Gnomes as well as Brian Froud’s books on Faeries and Goblins and they probably helped shape the idea for the project.  I have always had an affinity for creatures and fantasy since my childhood which is probably due to growing up in the 70s where I had exposure to a lot of Frazetta art as well as the sword and sorcery and fantasy revival in comics.”

Frazetta and Froud are names you don’t invoke without evoking a sense of majesty and grandeur, and a certain artistic royalty. So what is this book of Aaron’s that he talks about in the same breath as the fantasy greats?  Nothing less than The Fantastical Creatures Field Guide (How to Hunt Them Down and Draw Them Where They Live), a 144-page oversized beauty of an artbook that does indeed recollect the 80s books of Froud and Hildebrandt, Frazetta and Wrightson.  Not just in design but in subject matter as well: all those aforementioned artists are known for their fantastically-themed paintings, usually depicting ages-old warriors and demons, dragons and setting of Middle Earth, monstrosities of all shapes and sizes.

The artbook has evolved since then, now presented as a thing more conceptual, usually loosely-themed compilations such as Ashley Wood’s Una Fanta trilogy, wherein the books themselves follow a certain pattern or overarching concept—a “story”, if you will, minus any conventional concept of plot or character or dialogue.  Which is where Lopresti’s book differs.  Fantastical Creatures stands out as a hybrid of old and new, as a fundamentally bizarre creature showcase, but wrapped within a core-deep concept that takes the idea of embedding an artbook into the weave of traditional narrative further than most (and in fact, any at all, that come to mind) have attempted before.

You’d think illustrators trained in sequential storytelling would be locked into the storytelling structure, but comic book artists treat sketchbooks and coffee-table cut artbooks like their own Hollywood Walk of Fame star—it’s not an award per se, but it’s indelibly a mark of something akin to prestige.  Artists have art books, have collections of things untouched by a writer’s or story editor’s hands.  It’s their skill as an illustrator, loosed and unchained, unbound, perhaps unwound (knowing some of these chaotic scribblers).

“So far this book is the most important project I have done as an illustrator,” Aaron admits, seeming to confirm my mounting suspicion that artists are just pretentious bastards with delusions of grandeur.  “It represents all the elements that are of interest to me: writing, designing, and full color illustration. As much as I enjoy comics, this type of project is what I have always wanted to create.”

Usually, these books are not for the average comic reader.  They’re not books that collect any sort of long-term history on a subject, or else they focus upon too pigeon-holed a subject.  There’s no story, no through-line; it doesn’t hang from a wall to peer at casually (you have to crack open the book and “read” it); and yet there’s nothing to in fact read, so what’s the point?  I still can’t answer that for most, but Aaron Lopresti’s The Fantastical Creatures Field Guide is one of the first art books that is, in fact, a true-blue read.

It takes the form of a journal, a collection of catalogued adventures as recorded by one harebrained cryptozoologist (now missing, but whose papers are recovered) on a mission to debunk or find proof of every “common” mythological beastie the world over. The book organizes itself into seven chapters, one for each continent, a middling number of monstrosities hand-selected to represent each land mass.

“Interestingly enough,” Aaron confesses when asked about the origins of the book’s concept. “My original idea was to have the creatures listed by category, i.e. mammals, reptiles, et cetera.  It was the editors who came up with the travelogue concept, which ended up being a lot of extra work and rewriting for me, but well worth it in the end. I would say figuring out how to get some of the characters to work in Antarctica was the biggest challenge!”

I took a dive through Field Guide, initially, because I adore Aaron Lopresti as an artist and thought: Well, his art might be worth owning just a big fat tome of art and nothing more.  So I’ll give it a whirl.  I probably could (and should) have paid more attention to the press release and accompanying solicitation, which trumpeted a book that contained an unusually cohesive story-like “hook” to bring Aaron’s art together. Also, I should have realized that the art inside was 100% original, unique, and made solely for the book itself.  But even then, I’ve thumbed through supposedly “concept-driven” art books before, and always felt that they were, in the end, art books.

Fantastical Creatures Field Guide on the other hand, brings together a gorgeously coherent topic: mythical beasties crafted from whole Lopresti-cloth, often inspired by culturally famous creatures of myth, but each and every one a freakish thing of singular design, that of Aaron’s characteristically fluid stroke and an (unexpectedly) hysterical, cynical, bitingly sarcastic mind. Which is where Field Guide truly diverges from any other artbook of recent or distant memory: the narrative is as entertaining, captivating, and as powerful an element in the book as is the art itself.

There’s a story here, if not really a plot, and the voice Lopresti grants his narrator is virulently funny-as-sin. Humanity, science, religion, our desperate need to believe in things beyond what we see, these are all taken under a microscope and given the backhand.  It’s reminiscent of those comedy-slanted episodes of the X-Files, where a search for Chupacabra or vampires or shape-shifters would devolve into class, regional, and frame-of-mind wars between the players, ultimately spotlighting the humorous side of belief systems in general, of humankind’s nature to believe in something, at all costs.

Lopresti confirms: “I wrote dialogue for my high school assemblies (which I MC’d) that were about on the same level of cynicism as you find in this book.  I also have a real distrust for scientific discovery.  They always seem to be pushing theory as fact and then end up changing their minds every couple of years. That disdain is probably evident in the book.”

Oh, my, yes.  The humor of the book is exquisitely done, lowbrow in tone but highbrow—unexpectedly nuanced—in effect.  Lopresti has stormed out of the gates with a beauteous artbook that doubles as his first offering as a writer, and he has got chops as a writer, which should be news to just about everyone.

And lest I harp overly much on the prose (though it’s the mark of difference for certain—an artbook with great storytelling inside! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!), Lopresti, as an artist, more than fulfills the visual quality requirements an artbook demands.  Laying out pages of sketches and fully watercolored art, Field Guideis a dazzling coffee table tome, and should appeal to the discerning adult or wide-eyed youth with equal demand.

When asked about the challenges inherent in such a project, Lopresti promptly says: “Designing 40-plus hopefully interesting characters/creatures and then painting each one.  The color work was something that I don’t normally due in comics so it takes a complete different mindset.  Not to mention I was working on comics during the day and then switching gears to work on the book at night.”

And what of the book’s design?

“I had a lot to say, but I wasn’t always listened to.  The final cover design was not my choice but the publishers.  The cover is fine but I don’t think it reflects the content as well as it could. [BROKEN FRONTIER: It’s true. The cover offers no clue as to the book’s narrative coherency, or humor, or any quality at all beyond that it is a collection of creatures…of some sort.]  I gave the designer an idea of how I envisioned the interior of the book, but he came through with something far beyond what I initially imagined. Although, I try to be involved in as much as I can be when working on comics, this is the first project where I generated everything and was so deeply invested in the entire project.”

In closing, I queried Aaron on what his favorite mythical creature was, and his favorite common everyday creature.

“My favorite would probably be the Kraken. Giant Squids are just inherently scary. Although I would normally say Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster but I guess some people consider them real so they don’t count. as mythology.  As far as real creatures, I would have to say either the salt water crocodile, the great white shark, or the komodo dragon. I know that’s three but each has been a favorite at different times in my life.”

He went on to say that Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster were the first he ever believed in, and he wanted them to be real “soooooo bad. I still want them to be real, but I am pretty much convinced at this point that they aren’t.”

Fantastical Creatures Field Guide is far and away the most entertaining and thoroughly captivating artbook I’ve ever encountered.  There have been those more atmospheric, more persuasive on a visual level alone, but few if any have managed so all-encompassing a payoff for those who want a book they can straight-up read, like a book, and like an artbook.  “I’m hoping to springboard this project into children’s books with a fantasy slant. I’m currently working on one such project . Ultimately, the success of this book will determine the other opportunities I may or may not have down the line.”

If the book’s success is based on its quality, I think we’re witnessing the birth of a new long-running property!

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Order a copy of Fantastical Creatures Field Guide:

-Direct from the artist

-At Amazon

-At Barnes and Noble