Basewood
Written and
Illustrated by Alec Longstreth
Published by
Phase Seven Comics
A man who
can't remember anything meets a man who lost everything, trapped together in
the relative safety of the woods while a creature lurks ready to bring death to
anything that comes its way. But not all are content to live in a prison, no
matter how green. It's a story of survival and courage, created in the pages of
mini-comics and brought together in an absolutely gorgeous hardcover by Alec
Longstreth.
The story of
Basewood is the stuff of a fairy
tale, complete with a young man refusing to go along with the conventional
wisdom, a dragon to defeat, and an old man who councils caution and guards
against choices he failed to make. Yet despite this, Longstreth's plot never
feels cribbed from anything else. It's familiar but not contrived. He does a
great job balancing the arc of the main character against the mentor figure,
and we really aren't sure until the very end just how things are going to
resolve. The amnesia portion of the story goes just long enough, and when a
third figure enters the narrative, I really like how Longstreth handles the
dynamic. You know that this is going
to change things, but how that change occurs is done in such a way that I think
it comes as a bit of a surprise. Longstreth clearly understands the concept of
the hero's journey, and uses those parts to really entertain the reader.
Visually
this book is striking. Longstreth's linework is extraordinarily dense. He uses
a combination of heavy blacks, straight lines, cross-hatching and dots to
really give a sense of darkness to almost all of the book's pages. Often,
several of these techniques will be featured in the same panel, meaning that we
can get a very good idea that the man's clothing contrasts against the dog's
fur or the walls of the hut. When we move out into the barren desert, the
monster-cliffs, or even flashback sequences in a happier time, the openness of
the blank spaces helps set the contrast into a sharp relief. Similarly, when
it's snowing, Longstreth's use of white dots all over each panel means we don't need to imagine the snow and how
it changes things in the forest--we can see it for ourselves.
With so many
mini-comic artists focused on sparse backgrounds, Longstreth's attention to
shading really makes him stand out, even if he's not drawing a lot more in
terms of what we see on the page from others. It's still just a blanket on the
old man, but the addition of a patch that's shaded differently from the rest of
the covering adds so much and gives us a visual clue to what it's like to be
marooned alone--all without a single line of dialogue. In another case, the
branches that make up the hut have rough ends and feature small nubs that protrude,
letting us know this is meant for survival, not looks. Others might have just
gotten out the ruler and drawn them straight, but Longstreth takes the time to
show us these things so we can get a better idea of the backstory, if we choose
to look and linger. (And I highly recommend that you do.)
Though his
figure work is a bit on the stiff side--characters move, but they don't flow--I
do like how Longstreth makes sure that the facial features change based on the
situation and dialogue. He uses Annie-style
eyes, so a lot comes from the depictions of slight eyebrows or the curve of a
lip. Similarly, the hands of the old man are altered just enough to show they
are knurled compared to his younger companions. There's not a huge amount of
range--at the basic level of detail his figures are given, Longstreth can only
do so much--but what we get works in harmony with the words, not against them.
Basewood is a lovely fantasy story with
deep roots (and tall trees) in traditional folklore, and was a real joy to read
and linger over the pages. It shows that there's a real opening for doing
fantasy work in the mini-comics genre, and that it can be done without
elaborate, ornate art work or skills at the P. Craig Russell level. I'd love to
see more works like these when I'm scouring for new creators to follow at
shows. I'm looking forward to seeing what Longstreth does next.