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FICTION CLEMENS #1 - Best new comic of the year, hand's down
Original review posted here: http://www.brokenfrontier.com/reviews/details.php?id=1770
Fiction Clemens 1 (ADVANCE)
Words: Josh WagnerPencils: Joiton
Inks: Joiton
Colors: Alejandro Marmontel
Story Title: N/A
Publisher: Ape Entertainment/ Spacedog Entertainment
Price: $5.95
Release Date: May, 2008
Seriously: "Fiction Clemens"?!? What’s in a name? Instant intrigue and impossible to resist allure is what. Not only does the book sport an awesome title, but take a look at the premise: soft-spoken gunslinger Fiction Clemens, on the run from the son of a powerful tycoon, stumbles across a conspiracy to bring the Old West kicking and screaming into the Space Age! Bizarre? You bet. Enthralling? You better believe. Impeccable storytelling and eye-popping art? On every goddamn page.
Ape Entertainment has proven an up-and-coming powerhouse of a small press company, steadily improving and impressing over the years, but nothing has quite nailed their oddball flavor of classic genre fare re-spliced into something wholly else like Fiction Clemens.
The main character himself is unforgettable, a man of few words and always small font-ed ones at that. A dead shot and a quick draw but like the best of anime heroes he’s a lazy bastard until provoked. The villains are marvelously endearing and yet resolutely villainous, the vista of Fiction’s Old West populated by Tim Burton-esque grotesqueries. Michael Avon Oeming is quoted as claiming: "if Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton had a love child, it would be the world of Fiction Clemens", and he’s absolutely right. The humor is black and yet somehow light-hearted and impressively ever-present.
Writer Josh Wagner ("So This Robot Walks Into a Bar..." , from 24Seven Vol. 2) makes his full-length debut with Fiction Clemens 1, though he’s already got one novel (see below) under his belt, a wild book which in fact co-stars his toothpick-gnawing hero of FC. Even beyond the novel, Wagner additionally financed and created a Fiction Clemens movie trailer, a sincerely well-made piece of cinema that can be found at http://www.fictionclemens.org/, which was crafted during a period when FC was originally a screenplay, a thickset manuscript that awaited only a Hollywood-sized budget to topple serendipitously into its writer’s lap. Needless to say, the something-million dollar paycheck didn’t occur, but the concept of turning the film into a comparatively budget-less comic book did.
We get to reap the rewards of Wagner’s brainstorm: under his distinctive voice and unerring sense of pace and plot and personality, Fiction Clemens is hands down the best book Ape has yet released. The comedy is laugh out loud and the characters fascinating. The story itself kicks off with a bang and hardly ever relents. Interestingly, the story isn’t fast-paced, but the sheer wealth of elements introduced and explored keeps the narrative from feeling as though a dawdling or ever stalling thing. The dialogue is natural and rhythmic and dense, every character wielding a unique voice. When the more fantastical moments arise the story takes on a weightier quality, a mystique that should impel readers to return for the following issues two and three.
But Wagner’s inimitable script, being so inimitable, is one hard pressed to partner up with an artist who’s got the chops to showcase all essential elements, without losing the book’s as-a-whole, fine-tuned effectiveness. Yet the one-named "Joiton" is indeed such an artist. To try and compare his style to others would demand a list longer than this entire review and more, so many styles seem to be rolled up and on display within his pages. Surreal, impressionistic, cartoony, animation-like, all are words that work, though even all-together they fail in offering a solid definition that suits.
Joiton’s layouts are superb, his sequential storytelling skills better than most mainstream comic artists, yet his forms and figures are disproportionate and wild, wielding a sensibility on par with popular avant-garde comic artists such as Drew Rausch and Doug TenNapel. Further prettified by Alejandro Marmontel’s colors, Fiction Clemens is a book that—panel for panel—begs to be studied and explored, though Joiton’s dynamic eye for action and expression allows Fiction to be a breezy read besides.
Fiction Clemens is slated to run for three issues, each 52 pages in length, full-color, and sets to tell the entire "origin" of the title character and his partner/sidekick Dune Trixie. Technically, Wagner’s prose novel (again, see below) which boasts Fic’s first appearance is actually, chronologically speaking, an adventure that takes place after the comic series, after Fic and Dune’s pulp adventure status quo is set and they’re blasting across time and space like the best of Burroughs and Moorcock, only in decidedly more whimsical a fashion. Fiction 1 is an exceedingly enjoyable reading experience, one that prompted me to devour the "sequel" novel in two days flat. Look below for links to everything, the comic, the movie trailer, the novel, and then treat yourself to one of the best new concepts to hit comic stands in years.
Fiction Clemens 1 is on page 211 of the March issue of PREVIEWS for national release in May, ORDER CODE "Mar083428"
Check out Fiction Clemens’ official website and Myspace page, and see the utterly awesome trailer for the non-existent Fiction Clemens movie!!! (maybe one day…but the trailer is real!)
Also, be sure to check out Fic’s first appearance in the novel The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe which you can find at Lulu.com.
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