king of winter
cartoonist: Matt Emmons
Publisher: Second place for best media /$25
April 2024
king of winter Not speechless. Matt Emmons Know that a forest will never be silent, even after the world meets some weird and catastrophic end. But Coyote offered no explanation for his actions. The fairy tale creatures lingered in the woods for so long that they were almost indistinguishable from the covering of vines and leaves. They also kept their own counsel, summoning those they could not capture with black flowers instead of dialogue. . What about the goose? fraud. Don’t trust the goose.
This post-apocalyptic survival novel puts readers in the role of detective. The semi-silent coyote’s journey down the rabbit hole and what he finds there is the focus of the comic. Humanity is now largely gone, and our encounters with people suggest that individual stories are on a long precipice, fading but not yet gone. A couple, heavily armed and hoping to sleep in a destroyed car, was buried in a cave in a snowdrift. But this world no longer belongs to them. Everyone else Coyote encounters is consumed by evil science and natural magic. Coyote had no explanation for what he witnessed, nor did the damned, ghost or human, have any explanation for their actions. How the world came to be this way is up to our speculation.
The book’s risotto printing softens all edges, and the pink glow over the blue tones is a rosy dawn on the snow, and the air is filled with the cold mist of winter. Emmons is also a printmaker, and the process of making can easily influence his decisions as an artist. As for the line art, it’s the kind of uninhibited comic naturalism you’d expect William Stott or Ricardo Delgado. But compared to this, it’s more expressive, less flat, less rigid. reptilian age, less drying. Instead, Emmons evokes the dark fantasy of the original Dungeons and Dragons Mods, or intricate folklore illustrations Ivan Bilibin.
Ammons is surprisingly good at expressing emotion in silence. When a coyote is threatened, his tongue takes on a different shape; when a coyote makes a disturbing sound, his ears take on different angles. The panel caught his eye again and again, mysterious and observational. The interplay between the precision required to substitute dialogue with the body language of animals, the looseness required to strongly suggest human shapes among the chaos of foliage, and the subtle tones of Rizzo’s prints all combine to challenge description rather than contradictory.
Wandering without dialogue or context (and frankly not needing them) is, in my opinion, a simple story. Perhaps it was the feeling of watching events unfold, like a documentary rather than a fairy tale, that gave me the illusion of passivity. Although fairy tales are not known for explaining that much either. But in fact, it’s not Feel simple. It feels like there are rules, but their purpose has long been lost and their costs are still severe when broken.
There are stories in the woods. Some places are often haunted by thorn people. The knot of roots is not a maze or a message, but a tangled noose, closing in. The titular monarch may be gathering the souls of the fallen. Sow new flowers. Emmons, who has other comics in which magic similarly outlives the body, sets out a rough timeline that his books would follow when he so chooses: a war that produces unusually behaving souls, a period A long period of natural reclamation, and the appearance of animals somewhat different from those of the past.
those who haven’t read frog committee or those who inherit the earth (or this review) The sight of a ghostly procession passing by is as mysterious to them as it is to the coyotes. Explanation is a root, king of winter The fruits of its trees. Inexplicable things beneath the floating sheets. Some puzzle pieces are identifiable. Touchstones from the concrete past: crossbows, center fires, bells and clappers, balaclavas. Some survivors come from the natural world: geese, berry bunches, willows—right in front of us and still there after we’re gone. But some things shouldn’t be like this, paying the price of an unknown act by walking in the woods forever.
The horrors in the hut yielded the same pile of fruit that grew in the compost space once occupied by the Thorn Man’s corpse. The monarch’s branches are almost devoid of berries, although the king uses his fruits for nobler purposes. He brings release. The Thorn Man was trapped. The cover suggests that the berries growing from your corpse may be neither good nor bad, but inevitable and natural. Meanwhile, a coyote passes by.
king of winter Available from Second at Best Press or wherever niche comics and books are sold.
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