Courtesy Maxeem Konrardy.
I came back from FallCon—the largest of the two comics conventions in Minnesota—with a huge pile of stuff. Some was from creators I knew and liked, some was from people I’d vaguely heard of, and some was from guys I didn’t know from Adam. (Or Eve, in some cases.) Maxeem Konrardy’s Commune fit in that third category. On the basis of the gorgeous minimalist star-chart-plus-stick-figure cover, I decided to read it first. I’ve since read it three times, and I still don’t quite know how to react to it.
Commune takes place on a spaceship where something horrible has happened: everything’s broken, and everyone’s dead, except for three children. They’re alone, and frightened, and they may or may not be being stalked by a shadowy alien. It is, in its premise, Alien if the entire cast was younger than ten. The art is stark and simple; backgrounds are either monolithic steel walls, billowing clouds of dust, or pitch-black corridors. The characters are minimally rendered as well, with enormous eyes that detail their every emotion. In all, the art serves the story well: it’s introspective, tightly focused on the characters and their interactions.
But that story sticks in your head and will leave you pondering it for days. It’s horrifying to watch these children, ‘properly’ raised and taught, suddenly thrust into a situation over which they have no control. As with all the best horror films, the threat isn’t the alien (or the werewolf, or the vampire, or the dude with the hockey mask and chainsaw): it’s what’s inside the characters that threatens to destroy them.
The characters' visual simplicity helps tell the story that much more vividly.
Commune is a wonderful, horrible book. Get it now, read it once, quickly, and then again, slowly. And again, and again, and again.
(Also, for those of you who care about such things, the book is printed in an eco-friendly manner, with vegetable-based inks and distribution pollution offset by wind energy investment. So even though the book is black-and-white, it’s also about as green as you can get.)
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Comments
These comic strips are amazing!
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