Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Leo Fox’s Prokaryote Season, available now from Silver Sprocket.
by Arpad Okay. The sickness is unlikely, and the cure even stranger. Sydney set off on a quest to save Laurelie, their lover, whom they secretly accidentally cursed in the first place. Prokaryote Season is a book of knights and wishes and fantabulist apothecary shopping lists. An aged work for all the scribes before movable type, a plague book with magic and adventure, a graphic novel from Leo Fox.
A quest for material spell components prompted by a bad choice. A Grimm tale: light body horror and a philosophical parable to reckon with. Trans kids with a petrifying despondency that posits no matter what the era, if society has a concept of normal that its members ought to adhere to, being a part of it is going to suck.
Fox’s comic is about living in the world chivalry creates. Anyone remotely fun is ground down in the mill of a normalcy that treats longing as a saintly vocation while insisting on the denial of physical pleasure. The Romantic hero here has a heart. Right? The Epic is the tragic, infinite distance between what we want and what we’ve got. Some folks you can never get close enough to. That chasm is an ache, a hole in a tooth, pestilence.
Then Prokaryote Season turns over the stone of unfulfilled desire and examines the fearful earth beneath. What’s inside of us. Why we do what we do. Resulting in (utterly hallucinatory) emotional growth. In the characters? In the reader? Yes. Medieval punishment is nothing compared to what the jury decides inside.
Its heroes aren’t heroic at all. Telling their stories doesn’t make their actions any less reprehensible. The verdict is going to drop like a life sentence. No dragon’s fang or brigand’s blade can wound the heart as deeply as having to face one’s actions. And Prokaryote Season doesn’t have them anyway. Fox is more Chaucer, a story where fools tell on themselves. Some pilgrims!
A thoroughly satisfying and relatively elevating tale of character growth masquerading as monastic monk’s work. I like the idea of this book stepping into a world different from the present so that its trans characters are unburdened by the obligation to address the ubiquity of cis bullshit.
But trans people existed long before castles and chivalry, let alone monks and shit, so it’s not even like it’s another world. Like the freebooters in The Chromatic Fantasy, Prokaryote Season is decolonizing historical fiction. Look, a setting where someone can pine away from longing is perfect for these two. Sydney and Laurelie are relatable, effortlessly charming characters despite and because of their flaws.
The abundance of authenticity is fortified by the intimate zine aesthetic of the book. Simple, wiggly linework being the rule does not mean Prokaryote Season lacks for aesthetic development. The general vibe is the Bosch nightmare of consumption by demons, though with a somewhat Biblical, Romantic Fantasy softness to it. Laurelie is plagued by unbalanced humors not phantasmal creatures.
Fox speaks in a purely visual language existing around and in tandem with the main story. Drawing (literally) from an ancient lexicon, the pages stack blocks of image patterns, corralling the action to corners and sides. The embellishments of scribes and draftsmen, shrunk down and cut out, repasted together in copy machine punk collage.
Fox employs chaotic tessellation that marries biological diagrams with gothic stationery. The sweeping curves of Fox’s lines, the high-relief black and white, and the fairy tale macabre all strongly evoke Aubrey Beardsley. His bookplates in particular, the blossoms that would edge pages, the swans hiding in the reeds on his endpapers.
Prokaryote Season also displaces words among the plates. Blocks of text — long passages — accompany the images rather than exist within them. It’s deliberate, like Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn (though Baker has re-released it contemporarily, re-edited and ballooned, undoing his original dialog separation choice) or Joe Sacco’s expository chains dividing the layouts in Palestine. The reader must do the work of reconciling text and image, like a film with subtitles. It makes the spoken lines that appear in speech bubbles feel quite distinct tonally from the segregated inner thought blocks.
You get a play, with lines being delivered back and forth, but also a text-based depth of character revelation that won’t work on stage. One that typically doesn’t work for comics, either. Think of all the time that went into art like this to make it bloom. Not only comics but maturation as a medium. The books that look this way were developed ages ago, in another epoch. How is it that contradiction can reside so comfortably with satisfaction? Of course, Prokaryote Season is magic. Just look at it.
Prokaryote Season is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Published by Silver Sprocket / $24.99
Written and illustrated by Leo Fox.
Check out this 6-page preview of Prokaryote Season, courtesy of Silver Sprocket:
More Required Reading:
Notebook graffiti aesthetics give life to a small-time kingpin in All Talk
K Briggs’ shimmering Macbeth adaptation is an utterly unique reading experience
Griz Grobus is doodle-powered post-apocalypse from Simon Roy
