nixsight

Stone Island by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis

“Stone Island” has a premise that was immediately attractive to me. A new inmate arrives at a high-security prison, just in time for a demonic outbreak to sweep through the place. It’s survival horror mixed with prison drama, two favourite genres of mine.

The addition of the always dependable Edginton, and the promise in having Simon Davis – whose work I’ve enjoyed on 2000AD’s long running strip “Sinister/Dexter” – working on something requiring the collision of the realistic and the darkly fantastic added to the potential for big fun.

And some of the potential here is realised. It’s not a bad book at all. The idea is solid and well realised, and Edginton’s plot and script hit a lot of high points, and some of Davis’ art is just beautiful.

(Just to clarify – by “beautiful” I mean appropriately horrible…)

The scenes of human violence are well realised and carry a certain peculiar level of restraint – peculiar because they are graphic but, as in the first series of the TV show “Dexter”, they more often show the end result than the violence itself. And the scenes of subhuman violence have a surreal body-horror vibe, reminiscent of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” or the movie “Society”.

A quick aside to be explored sometime – did anyone else notice the casual slide into full-frontal male and female nudity and adult language that happened at 2000AD a few years back and reaches a kind of apex in “Stone Island”? It easily overtakes the controversy of Bisley or O’Neill trying to sneak in crafty silhouetted phalluses into the mag’s pages a decade or so ago, and it’s happened in a wonderfully cheeky way – I doubt many of the newsagents that seem to happily stock the magazine on the lower shelves have examined it all that closely in recent years. The only downside to it is I fear it’s broken some of the character of the thing – there’s something to be said for the part innuendo and subtlety have in creating good allegory or satire.

Anyway… As I was saying – there are moments when this book is just lovely. Unfortunately, there are also problems with it, and they’re mostly to do with pacing. None of this will be a surprise if you’ve read what I thought of “Stickleback”, another collection of an Ian Edginton penned 2000AD story – I complained there that the story unfolds at a good rate up to a point, but then rushes for the finish line in what are obviously the last couple of episodes.

In “Stone Island” this problem is more spread out, and here as with his previous work, I think it is more down to the constraints of the format than Edginton himself. A 2000AD strip can’t afford to have a long lead time before things start to really happen, which seems to be the problem here.

Prison drama as a genre requires a certain amount of breathing room to establish characters – even if those characters are only ciphers – and allow it’s audience to become invested in them. It also needs the chance to properly establish physical location – whether it’s an escape story like “Prison Break”, or a commentary like “Oz”, part of the point of having a prison as your location is the environment – the close-quarters, and the layout of the shared areas are all important to establish tone, and build tension around what happens to the psyche of prisoners kept in these conditions.

Survival horror makes similar demands of a story when it comes to characters. Again, it doesn’t matter if an individual character is little more than a bundle of stereotypical quirks or they fit a very basic archetype – if the audience doesn’t have a chance to distinguish them properly from other characters, their fate isn’t going to mean anything to that audience. At the same time, the physical space that the story happens in is also important to the genre, and needs to be established properly, so that we can feel for ourselves how very badly trapped the people are.

Edginton seems to understand these things, but there just isn’t enough space to work through them all, and it ultimately hobbles the story. In fact, the book contains two “Stone Island” stories, the first taking place in the prison, and the second taking a more expansive view of the world after the incursion that occurs in the first and what happens next, and I reckon the opening story would have benefitted and flourished had it actually been the full length of the book. There are certainly enough ideas and character interactions in each story to justify it.

Davis, also, doesn’t always aid the plot when it comes to establishing space and continuity. His art has a tendency to shift from realistic to expressionistic very quickly in dynamic action sequences, and this can make for slightly confusing storytelling. But this, again, isn’t necessarily his fault, because there is almost too much action happening all at once to have it presented any other way.

The second story works better than the first, but again, it comes too soon, and is all over too quickly.

This series has enough going for it to fill at least a couple of volumes – the sort of strip that mid-eighties 2000AD really excelled at. It could have been awesome, but instead was just pretty cool as a transitory thrill.
Y: The Last Man Vol 1 – Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

Okay, okay, it’s ridiculous that I’ve only just got around to reading this book properly, but the first issue came at a time when I was opting out of more comics than I was opting into, and at the time it didn’t look to me like a book that would go the distance.

Yes, I’m an idiot. Years later, and now not only has “Y The Last Man” completed it’s run, but it’s one of the most widely acclaimed books of the last decade or so.

Everybody loves Y, it seems.

In case you didn’t know this already, the series is about what happens when all of a sudden, every male on the planet dies. This tragedy happens across all species, and there are only two survivors – An aimless young man called Yorick, and his monkey Ampersand.

At this point – and as far as I know – throughout the series we never find out why this has happened, although a few theories are posited by this first book, and at least some of the characters seem to want to find out as much as we do.

But the mystery isn’t the thing, here, so much as finding out what happens next, and working out where all of the characters are going to end up. Multiple threads that are easy to get wrapped up in, and constant intrigue make this a hell of a page-turner.

The series is sympathetically and smartly written by Vaughan, such that it explains why fans of the book were so excited when they heard about his involvement with the then listless “Lost” – Once the switch in your head clicks and you decide to invest in this story, you quickly realise that you need to read the next installment yesterday.

It’s beautifully drawn by Pia Guerra, as well – very clean lines and confident storytelling and acting sets this apart from many other Vertigo books with the possible exception of Fables. And that book has an incredible pedigree.

Isn’t it interesting how much easier it is to talk about things that have stuff wrong with them than things that seem perfect? If anything, the fact that I know that this story is going to be playing out over ten decent-sized volumes reassures me that it’s potential is going to play out properly, which only seems to prove my issues with “Stone Island”.

Off to Ebay, then, to try and find the next nine volumes. Vol 3 seems otherwise quite hard to get hold of…