Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Andrew MacLean’s Snarlagon, available now from Laser Wolf Attack.
by Arpad Okay. I hope you like it when classic cars drift. Gargantuan creatures are trampling the city, and the hero on his way from the dark side of the moon is even bigger than they are. The army isn’t very effective, but they’re there in force anyway, blowing things up, getting turned into skeletons wearing helmets and carrying machine guns. Between the kaiju battle and the munitions, there’s quite a bit of flaming debris. Escaping this mess with passengers intact takes damn good driving.
The look of the whole affair is vintage, not just the car. Andrew MacLean’s dedication at the front of Snarlagon is to Ray Harryhausen and Ishirô Honda. The setting could be a studio stage from one of Honda’s films. Snarlagon himself, hero of the moon and the colossal ancient google-eyed Angramite invaders, are absolutely excellent looking. A satisfying blend of chunk and monster that strongly recalls old soft-vinyl toys as much as shows and movies. The round edges and thick, tootsie roll-shaped, segmented arms and legs of Snarlagon are a Michelin Man’s bike tire density, unbustable.
MacLean’s art is magnificently textured as well as proportioned. Part of that is the shading. Monochrome watercolors give a natural wash of noise that fleshes out the bold contour lines, adding dimension to the bibendum art style. There is another layer of drawn monochrome on top in the form of dots. Stippled fields where drawing and coloring become the same thing. You can see the creation of the comic in motion, where MacLean goes back to add more dots, now in white instead of black or gray, a wave moving in the opposite direction. The layering technique to build an image reminds me more of painting than drawing — though I suppose that’s what coloring is, a comics synthesis of the two.
He is very conscious of where to keep white pure — muzzle flash — so it outshines the rest of the panel but never allows true black to obscure anything in the frame. The “lighting” is as consciously constructed as developing film stock. And you can tell where MacLean’s priorities as a creator modulate, when the scene calls for an illustrator’s pause. The flow of story is interrupted for a moment of awe: turn up the special effects. The plot comes quick and effortlessly. The cool shit makes itself stand out.
A single panel can do an enormous amount of storytelling in the reader’s imagination if the right moment is captured. MacLean-as-illustrator can do that and more. He keeps going beyond the scene that grabs you, drawing until the page is filled. The pacing is balanced so that the plot isn’t cluttered by extraneous details. But the splash pages not only vividly describe a moment of action, the backgrounds hold their own beauty and interest.
Snarlagon, as a whole, is a dance of the two speeds. The big fight has its splash pages and background action, but choosing a four-panel, two-page combat layout during the climax is interesting given how pages of conventionally-paced people-panels there are setting things up. The best-dressed kid in comics gets to talk and talk and talk before the monster comes to save everybody (big Gamera energy), but then — biff boom pow — the end of the book, like an episode of Ultraman or Power Rangers. There’s some colossal invasion splash earlier (the Angramite army’s appearance). But it seems, at first, like an odd allocation of resources to pace the book like a film.
Your effects budget is infinite! But it feels truer this way.
My transcendental Snarlagon moment came after I’d finished the comic, in the supplements. MacLean takes behind-the-scenes literally, with a series of moments highlighting the studio crew who make the cinema magic happen. It became a movie. The fans and smoke, the lighting on stage, and the accompanying darkness on set. The other side of the camera (one that never existed) focus-pullers and operators, as well as effects people, grips, techs, the director. Talk about an image that tells a story beyond the moment it captures. After reading all the madness that just occurred in Snarlagon proper, the production scenarios suddenly demanded of me were unimaginably bonkers.
Snarlagon is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Laser Wolf Attack/$10
Written and illustrated by Andrew MacLean.
Edited by Erin MacLean.
Check out this 7-page preview of Snarlagon, courtesy of Laser Wolf Attack:
More Required Reading:
Prokaryote Season is a Grimm tale of knights, wishes, and apothecary shopping lists
Notebook graffiti aesthetics give life to a small-time kingpin in All Talk
K Briggs’ shimmering Macbeth adaptation is an utterly unique reading experience
