Image copyright © 2013 Salgood Sam/Max Douglas.
I posted this review on Goodreads already but I thought I'd re-post here with a few links to the author's work.
The fictions unfold surreally. “Each day he
awakes to another dream-like day,” reveals the narrator of “Pin City”. But
these are not dreams of optimism; there is little joy to be found either in the
text or the art work. What these stories do offer, however, is a looking glass
to contemporary North American society where predominantly men above a certain
age are caught up in a kind of hinterland between what they imagine life should
offer and what the reality of their existence is.
Like much post-modern fiction, the stories
in Revolver One call attention to
their very artifice: reflections within reflections ask the reader to make
comment on what it means to observe. Douglas conveys this apathy so well the
text is all but superfluous and, at times, it becomes an impediment to the visual
narrative.
Though muted and limited in palette, the
art demonstrates a level of skill many comic artists can only aspire to.
Perspectives are juxtaposed Escher-like adding to the alter-reality quality of each individual story as well as the collection generally. Revolver One feels like a cohesive
whole.
“The Rise and Fall of It All” employs Douglas’ perspective wizardry at
its very core to tell the story of a man who loses his job. Having worked in a
glass cube at the top of a sky scraper overlooking the city, the protagonist
finds himself down on the street, overlooked by the reader, a shift that far
from allowing the reader any sense of superiority instead acts as a warning
against the kind of apathy explored in “Pin City”. The themes of this
collection echo and reverberate in every panel.
One feature of the layout that really
surprised and delighted me, as a reader and aspiring comic artist, is Douglas’
use of tangents to create intense dialogue between the external landscape of
the city and the inner or psychological landscape of the protagonist.
What Revolver
One demonstrates is that there’s more than one way of looking at something.
We can observe society from a distance, objectively, but unless we put
ourselves in the position of the protagonist in any of these fictions, we may
end up trapped in not so much a dream world as a reality behind glass, unable
to escape.
