Angelic, by Simon Spurrier and Caspar Wijngaard
2018
At a glance at the cover, I didn't think this was going to be my sort of comic. But I've been trying to get out of my comfort zone and expand the kinds of books I read, because that's how I got into comics originally, that's how I learned about new books and creators. With this book, it's written by Simon Spurrier, who I've read a few X-comics from, but I don't know his work well. He has a fairly good reputation as a writer, and was widely praised last year for his work on Hellblazer. Plus, this is creator-owned work. This isn't the B-level stuff you give to the Big Two, this is the gold you want to own the rights to. That was my thinking, plus it was cheap...¥669?! I could have sworn it was closer to ¥300. It must have been a late night impulse order.
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| This is not comic sized! It's closer to A5 |
Angelic is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, where a tribe of winged monkeys live in the skyscrapers of a human-less city, and the ground is covered in a poison cloud. One monkey, Qora, is soon to be married and have her wings clipped as is monkey law (or lore as they call it) when her adventure of discovery occurs.
Right from the start, it's trading in lots of tropes. The post-apocalyptic setting (did the human race do this to itself? Spoiler: yes.). The hero's journey. Monkeys. The ideas behind Angelic are variations on themes which can range from traditional to tired, depending on your experience with genre fiction. So, with that being the case, the book relies not on what the creators are doing but on how they do it.
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| Wijngaard can draw and has fun reimagining the world |
For me, while there is stuff in the book I can praise, I found a lot of the book to be hard to enjoy. The number one challenge is the art. Wijngaard is not a typical comic illustrator. He has flair that reminds me of spray paint graffiti in the 90s or cell-shaded video games. Characters are stylized with fat outlines. That in itself looks alright, but his choice to make the colors of the book turquoise and magenta are an eyesore. If you don't like the cover, you aren't going to like the insides more. I'm really open to non-traditional comics art, but this doesn't work for me. Good comic art should be read intuitively, and in a lot of the art in Angelic, I found my eye scanning the page for what to focus on. Design trumped readability here.
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| The images don't pop off the page. |
The second thing that makes it a hard read was the post-human dialogue. Spurrier wants to show the monkey society is it's own society and uses its own dialect, and the book contrasts it with a manatee society which speaks a dialect closer to our English. In practice, it means almost every page has Qora saying the word poop as a swear word. Poop. Poopest. Poop it. Is it for kids? The book is listed as teen. Who is it for? I just don't want to read a child's word for shit over and over again. The rest of her vocabulary, words like devildirt, nobedient, expendibubble; it's playful enough and not too much to sort through, but none of them are repeated so incessantly as poop. I was thinking back to great books like Clockwork Orange or Ridley Walker, which use invented language to show how language and meanings evolve and place you in a new frame of mind, but here it's more just cute. I wish he'd dialed it back a lot.
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| Repeat this one hundred times |
There is something good here though. This is a self-contained story which is wrapped up but is open to continuation at the end. And the pacing from issue to issue is really strong. The mythology of the book expands in each issue, and everything is tied together well. On that level, it's very successful. The character design is good as well. The monkeys and manatees and cats (no spoiler, there's one on the cover) all look pretty cool. So while I didn't enjoy the book overall, it could definitely be retooled into something quite good.
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