Broken Frontier

Broken Frontier gives the first 288-hour graphic novel ever made a two-part Inter-Review — a review and an interview in one!  Looking at Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden.

So as not to simply reiterate what’s already up and online, be sure to check out the two-part interview with Kevin Cannon over at The Daily Crosshatch to complement this super-special inter-review.

TDC Interview with Kevin Cannon - Part 1   Part 2

Broken Frontier Review: It began as a challenge that artist Kevin Cannon didn’t take seriously: draw a 24-page 24-hour comic once every month for a year, and then have a 288-page “288-hour graphic novel” at the finish line. But then the man who suggested the dare — Steven Stwalley — posted about the event online, and Cannon figured he had to do it.

So he managed to crank out 24 pages in 24 hours for four months (96 hours in all), until his right arm went numb for two days straight and he was forced to abandon the absolute rigors of the 24-in-24 concept. But handling one page per hour and finishing the 288th page approximately one year from when he began, the general idea of the challenge held sway.  But then the story Cannon was constructing — a book collectively titled Far Arden   — was too epic to stop there, and ultimately it came to a whopping 350 pages. By that point the original challenge was out the door, abandoned to the needs of the story’s demands.

The joy of this, however, is that Far Arden now stands complete as a thing that combines the best of two worlds: that of the purely spontaneous burst of comics creation and that of the carefully constructed adventure saga. It stars an unforgettable protagonist named Armitage “Army” Shanks, a rough-and-tumble arctic explorer and ex-captain of the Aeropagitica, and follows his quest to fulfill an ages-old promise and find the mythical land of “Far Arden”. Shanks is molded with an old-world animal charisma, so much so that readers should slip easily into the step of his journey, no matter that the details of the plot remain vague for most the book and the supporting cast slow in making themselves known. It’s enough, at least first, just to watch Shanks dodge RCAN authorities and sit in a bar and gripe while smoking a floating pipe.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Far Arden is one of the most unruliest and unpredictable adventure comics I’ve read in a long while, and yet the story weaves itself into a pretty complex and consistent whole. Since you began this yarn in “24-hour comic” style, what was the plotting of it like? Was this something you’d deal with only when drawing, or was there a fair amount of preparation in-between?

KEVIN CANNON:  The first chapter was completely spontaneous and each subsequent chapter became more and more controlled as I tried to tie up loose ends. Dealing with so many characters and story arcs became increasingly difficult, so at one point I typed out all of the key scenes in the book, printed them out on separate scraps of paper, and set them on my floor and arranged them into chapters. That really helped me see the book as a whole, and see which arcs were lacking, incomplete, or unnecessary. 

BF: Shanks being the utterly lovable (if rough around the edges) protagonist that he is, what models did you use for his character?

KC:  Shanks' earliest model is Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer who attempted to cross the Antarctic continent in 1914 but instead lost his ship before touching land and was forced to survive on the ice for two years. Shackleton was tough as nails when he needed to be, but had a soft side that endeared him to his crew. I happened to be in London during the Maritime Museum's exhibit of the major Edwardian polar expeditions. That had a profound effect on me, being able to see the explorers' artifacts. I touched the chair Shackleton died in.  That was a weird moment.

BF: And “Far Arden”—a Jim Morrison reference?

KC:  Good catch. Jim Morrison was my hero all through high school. He wrote a lyric that can be paraphrased as "I'll always be true…If you'll only show me Far Arden again."  For some reason that lyric stuck with me.  I have no idea what Morrison meant by the lyric, nor does anyone I think, so I put my own spin on it.

BF Review: From the offset, readers know Far Arden’s going to be fun, with an opening couple of pages that display dialogue is SFX-sized statements and a crazy cast of characters piled into a sea-side saloon. And indeed, the first few chapters lump subplot after subplot,   oddball characters and crazy-cool ideas one after the other, almost as thought Cannon were trying to one-up himself at every turn. But eventually the story finds a certain rhythm, style, and focus, and long before the halfway point is even approached, it seems certain that the book’s core will be a solid if plot-twist riddled one. Its seemingly never-ending cast all find spotlights to step into and give up their origins, one story dovetailing into another, and then the ending — it’s a true payoff in more ways than one.

BF: Harping one more time on the plot, did you plan at the offset on tying all the disparate threads together, or did this just come about in an organic sense?

KC  I had no idea what I was doing.  I wasn't even sure I would finish the project to be honest with you. All of the bizarre characters in that first scene — the circus warden, the man-beast, the college kids — when I drew them in I had no vision of how they'd fit into the story. But that was all part of the fun: the spontaneity and self-imposed challenges.

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Read part two of our Inter-Review with Kevin Cannon tomorrow.

And be good to yourself and seek out Kevin Cannon’s comic studio Big Time Attic or just check out everything Kevin comic-wise at www.kevincannon.org