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Review: Kevin Cannon's Far Arden
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Who wouldn't be?
Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden is the best book you’ll read this year that was created on a bet. Cannon was challenged by Steven Stwalley, founder of the International Cartoonist Conspiracy and fellow local cartoonist, to create one 24-hour comic every month for an entire year. (For those of you who don’t know, a 24-hour comic is just that: an entire comic, 24 pages long, created entirely within a span of 24 hours. Check here for more info.) The end result would be a 288-page graphic novel, created in twelve caffeine-fueled bursts over the course of a year.
Cannon didn’t quite make the terms of the bet: only the first four months’ pages were created in 24-hour chunks. But he did finish the book--and what a book it is.
Army Shanks, salty seadog and perpetual adventurer, is in search of the mythical land of Far Arden in the Canadian Arctic, in order to fulfill a promise he made to his mentor. Along the way--as is common in these sorts of adventures--he encounters vengeful orphans, a circus strongman with dreams of movie-stardom, several polar bears forced from their habitats by global warming, and that which most threatens the adventurer: betrayal.
This is Cannon’s longest and most ambitious solo project to date--on most projects, he shares art chores with the other half of local studio Big Time Attic, Zander Cannon (no relation). His art is a joy to read: characters leap across the page with noodle-limbed physiques, but he can wring surprising emotional depth from their exaggerated features when he chooses. Similarly, although the story starts off as a ridiculous adventure yarn, it rapidly develops into a much more engrossing meditation on obsession, with a thoughtfulness and depth that isn’t immediately apparent. Characters that might have initially seemed like one-note jokes turn out to have complex backstories and motivations.
Arden was originally posted on the web, and the entire story can be found here, for free. But the print version is highly recommended for any comic fan, if for no other reason than Cannon’s maps of the Canadian arctic printed on the endpapers.
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