Tagged: fantasy

Halloween decorations are beginning to show up in stores, and the air had a decided chill today in my neck of the woods – so I guess the time is ripe to look at a couple of horror-tinged graphic novels for the fall.

Angel Skin is an original GN and apparently the first published comics work of its creators, Christian Westerlund and Robert Nazeby Herzig. (By the way, I’m tentatively assuming that the two are writer and artist, respectively, but the book itself doesn’t specify their roles.) It’s a dark afterlife fantasy, beginning with the suicide of our young protagonist, Joshua Barker. He then finds himself in a gloomy city that is, in most respects, identical to the world he lived in before his death.

The story moves on from there in somewhat predictable ways; Joshua is important and special, for some reason unspecified in the book, and is the focus of several people and factions who want to find God, for their own purposes. There’s a bit of melodramatic action, but much more specifying and emoting. The general consensus of the characters is that life is essentially hell. (See Bruce Eric Kaplan’s cartoon book Edmund and Rosemary Go To Hell, which I reviewed on my personal blog a couple of months back for a somewhat more nuanced version of the same general idea.) I’m afraid I’m no longer a teenager, so Angel Skin’s primary appeal passed me by, but it was never embarrassing or puerile. (And that’s saying a lot about a Goth afterlife fantasy; it could very easily have slid into the sophomoric, but it never does.) It’s mostly a story for Goths and other depressive young people, I think, and the ending isn’t quite as uplifting as I think it’s supposed to be, but Angel Skin is a serviceable GN, and quite good for anyone’s first professional work.

The really interesting aspect of Angel Skin, though, is the art. I don’t know which of the creators is responsible, but the style changes greatly from page to page, and even on a single page. Sometimes the figures have an animation-derived flatness, with blocks of solid color of grays filling in black outlines, while other times the figures are painted (or perhaps drawn in colored pencils?) or sketched in pencil lines. The background art style similarly changes, and doesn’t necessarily match the foreground. In fact, characters don’t stay in the same style, and the several styles often uneasily co-exist in one panel. I wasn’t able to work out any coherent reason for the changes – it doesn’t seem to relate to anything thematic in the story, or having to do with location, emotional states, or anything else I could think of – so I have to assume that it was simply done for artistic whim.

(more…)