Broken Frontier

High seas pirating. That is what this book is all about. But this be not any scurvy Disney book. This book is full of pirate queens, rape, murder and pillaging. Mysticism and backstabbing.

Jamie Delano is obviously obsessed with language. In Narcopolis he invented a newspeak. Here, he writes in the idiom of the setting. It is the 1600's and the Caribbean. This allows him the opportunity to play with Spanish and English at the same time. But more importantly, it allows him to create the evocative poetry of the time. The narration reads with emotion and elegance, even when it is being crass and vulgar.

That is the other thing that stands out about this book. The main story is of La Sirena, a pirate queen of sorts who has set up a safe haven for members of that profession. She captures a rather prominent Englishman’s boat and makes off with his daughter in a sordid little tryst. Of course, in a true Dickensian type plot line, the father sends her fiancé after her. He is enraged by his betrothed’s disloyalty and lets the priest who really controls his vessel decide her fate. There is enough lust, rape and backstabbing here to make Erica Caine wince at it all. Especially when weird deformed monkey hunchback things get into the action.

The language may be a problem for some readers. This reader found himself rereading it as he often got lost in the ebb and flow of the narration and dialogue. This is a good thing really, it is nice to see more lavish writing done in a comic and it never comes off as pretentious or superfluous. However, readers used to thinly worded decompressed books of splash pages may not enjoy the effort required for this story.

The characters are another sticking point. They are all fairly unlikeable. Even the one "good guy" who steps up to the ruthless English Captain is a bit a jerk in the beginning. The kidnaped girl comes off as naive and kind of dumb. Everyone else is just out for themselves. Of course, this makes for the melodramatic and cut throat antics necessary to a pirate tale.

The art is provided by Max Fiumara who has received acclaim for his deformed caricature in Four Eyes. Here he works somewhere in between his normal line and the more dominant "house" style prevalent in the large majority of Avatar books. Most of this is achieved by the coloring of Digikore Studios which gives the book a feeling of belonging when stood up to others from the publisher. There are glimpses here and there of Fiumara’s more angular stylings, but the anatomy is more inline with reality than some elongated fantasy. It is probably an appropriate move for this book that is decidedly dark in both its night time milieu and its thematic elements.

A thrilling bit of oversexed pirate lore is started here with just a hint a supernatural things abounding in future volumes. Rawbone is a different book. It is not following some hype and is not some rehashed narrative from a writer past his prime. While it is in no way a perfect book, as it is a little muddled, it is an attempt to try something different and for that it should be commended.