Broken Frontier

I can’t seem to understand our cultural fascination with prequels. So here is a story. Maybe a boy-meets-girl-coming-of-age-save-the-world-nay-galaxy story. Make whatever variations you like, but the story the storyteller chooses to tell is significant because it takes place at some crucial turning point between success and failure. That’s the drama. Them’s the thrills. And people love it. Amazing! A terrific new story enters our world! People demand more!

Logically, those storytellers would respond by providing the further adventures of those characters. What happens next? Are there more adventures? Of course, say the storytellers. But we’re not going to tell you about those.

Wouldn’t you rather hear about what happened before that first story? That is to say, wouldn’t you be interested in a new story about the time leading up to the turning point that so captivated your imaginations? A time before the boy met the girl and before they came of age and before they saved the world? Doesn’t that sound exciting?!!

Wait. You’re not as jazzed about that? How shocking. There are all these people out there, custodians of the stories that grabbed your imaginations and tickled them in new exciting ways, who seem to think you’d love to have a prequel. So maybe it’s less of me not understanding our cultural fascination with prequels and more of me not understanding why creators think we’re fascinated with prequels.

So let’s talk about Fathom, shall we? My goodness, was Fathom a good comic book when Michael Turner sprang it on us all those years ago. This girl Aspen finds out she’s not a surfer girl after all but instead the Chosen One from a hidden race of underwater people with incredible powers over the water. And her people? Not all of them are very nice. Some of them even trick her into using her powers to nearly wipe out the human race. And there’s beautiful women and a rakishly handsome guy with a boat who’s a hero and there are battles in cool underwater jets and it’s wicked cool.

That was a while ago. Since then, Michael Turner founded Aspen Comics and he’s launched new properties all while promising that Fathom will return. That was also a while ago. Since that time, I have dropped twenty to forty dollars on the counter of my comic shop, all for titles that I thought were continuations of the first arc. Nope. Except for the preview a while ago in which Aspen is kidnapped by the Black, the rest of the spin-offs have been prequels or worse, ten-page previews disguised as full issues but really full of ads and sketchbooks.

And now we have Fathom Prelude, which is a story about Aspen as a little girl before powers and adventures. What’s going on here? Michael Turner, you have projects to be working on! You and J.T. Krul wrote the best single issue of a comic book Aspen has produced to date! You’ve got Alé Garza drawing so well that I actually mistook his work for yours! Likewise, Beth Sotelo’s color work is so good that I am officially re-excited about Fathom. Why are you teasing us with this unnecessary prequel? Get to work on the good stuff! You people clearly have the talent!

I’m serious. Fathom Prelude is a terrific single issue of a comic book. There’s character development. There’s actual emotional content. The story of Aspen on the Olympic team is smart and poignant and so gorgeously illustrated that it really does feel like the first act of the Hollywood movie adaptation more than a simple comic. I can’t say enough good things about what a terrific introduction it is for the character and for what a solid improvement it is in the writing and character department over the original. Even the dialogue, which is always a little on the thin side in Fathom, is true and expressive here.

But it’s an unnecessary prequel, and it’s not the first for this series. Volume 2 begins on Wednesday. It is my sincere hope that all the teases and prequels pay off. At the very least, it’s time for the people at Aspen to get down to the business of telling their stories.

-Jesse Vigil