THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Arpad Okay. Losing your grip on reality is a lot easier when you’re on your own, and each day blends into the next. Scientists who study nature are a fascinating contradiction where they want a healthier planet for all, and they need isolation — to be away from people to save them. A transmission comes through one evening on the lab’s corporate fax that appears to be a mistake. A pattern like the veins in a leaf. A cat’s stripes. And everything changes.
If you think a printer malfunction tipping the plot into Lynchian dream logic is weird, well, I agree with you. Far Distant is a book I’m still struggling to figure out. Trying to pin the details down and form my version of the events is certainly possible, but it feels wrong. A Liang Chan is faxing us visions. The true tale gets told when you give up on reconciliation and give in to its poetry.
To understand Far Distant, you need to consult your emotions instead of trusting your eyes.
This is kind of hard, as Chan’s art is dark. Not dark as in messed up, dark like at sunset. Falling asleep is to dive deep into the jungle and talk with tigers. The ferns are an eggplant violet over a forest floor the color of moss and mud. It is vividly anti-bright — the ghostly texture of tattoo ink on dark skin. The palette in Far Distant recalls Tillie Walden’s comics-by-night coloring in On A Sunbeam. It evokes the purposefully scratched-out horror of Cathy G Johnson’s Black Hole Heart, an unparsable idea visually obscured.
Light and color cut through the dusk of dreams. Phosphorescent greens spotlight the scientist and their discovery; beyond the first layer of dreaming burns fire as lush as all the sunrises the rest of the book lacks. Day comes to the valley as a faint haze, the color of fruit that’s not yet ripe. Chan’s figures are drawn simple and solid, and the setting is spare. Plants grow like the teeth in a comb; there’s no chaos in the waking world. I like the cartoonish quality of the devices in the office; they would be at home in Dr. Seuss’ reverie movie, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (or the bizarre Fort Thunder comics of CF).
The pages stutter and drag their rhythm as a wide variety of panels corral the story. Thin strips of dream intrusion cut pages in two. Small panels tile the edges of a large, empty room, with orderly rows of the forgotten items within it. The counterpoint Chan has included in the binary code that the panels rap out is the long, curving tails attached to all the speech balloons. They fatten as the book goes on, becoming plump vines that squeeze the words off the page.
The mundane passes through the threshold, and a higher logic moves the pieces across the board. It’s time for something new. The story contradicts itself. Has this happened before to the person previously posted to this station? How can so many cycles pass without any communication from home? How much of the story never really happened? Far Distant is busy dreaming.
8 out of 10
Far Distant is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Bulgilhan Press / $15.00
Written and illustrated by A Liang Chan.
Check out this preview of Far Distant, courtesy of Bulgilhan Press:
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