Posted By Keith Hendricks on September 30, 2013

If you read mainstream comics, you might know Charles Soule from his recent run on Swamp Thing, or the much anticipated Superman / Wonder Woman title. Strange Attractors, from Archaia Books, could be said to be Soule’s current opus, as it is a tour de force with a plot as cohesive as a laser and finely hewn characters. However, it is more of a hat trick than a novel, as it is a bit of a dare–how long can this tragicomical fractal wind its plot lines around its characters before surrendering to the traditional forms of modernist fiction, happy ending and all?

And yet it is very unique in terms of genre, less science fiction than “mad science fiction.” The protagonist and patron of the book, Dr. Brownfield, is certainly a mad scientist with pretensions as to the ability to perceive and manipulate both the kinetic and cultural energies of New York City, and during the course of the book he proves these pretensions to be true. Unlike Faust or Frankenstein, he neither bargains with or builds demons, but Brownfield is ultimately slain by the upshot of his own machinations. And the book’s protagonist, Heller Wilson, makes a Faustian bargain of sorts with Brownfield. In this way, Soule’s narrative is a reimagining of the myth of the Sorceror’s Apprentice, although instead of brooms animated by magic, the city of New York is the golem being maneuvered by mathematical poltergeists. This power is intoxicating and it both empowers and corrupts its wielders.

First we meet Jenkins, a TA at Columbia who gives a meandering tirade about New York, then wanders away from the classroom to pitch himself through a window. His mathematical studies had infected his way of thinking, so that everything seemed interconnected, and this paradigm shift had cast his psyche into suicidal despair. Cut to Heller Wilson, a graduate student at Columbia, who corners Professor Spencer Brownfield in a diner and persuades him to assist Wilson with his dissertation. In return, Wilson agrees to perform some odd jobs for the professor. It is in the diner, and in the repercussions of the events of that lunch, that we learn Brownfield’s study of complexity has influenced his day to day life. Before they leave, Brownfield lets a rat loose in the diner. Later we learn that the diner is closed by the board of health, and that this, according to Brownfield, will help to serve the greater good. Brownfield’s voodoo math had corrupted his former associate Jenkins’s sanity, but Brownfield manages to keep not only himself together but the city of New York by serving the greater good with his complexity theories. He tells Heller that he has with his seemingly unconnected actions across the city, prevented numerous other cataclysms. In performing these apparently random and nonsensical acts throughout the city, which he calls “corrections,” he maintains status quo in the city. “If you know what to change, you can make anything happen, and I know, Mister Wilson. I speak the city’s language.” And now, the city will be the laboratory for their new experiments, Brownfield tells Heller. At Brownfield’s apartment, Heller sees that this is not all just hocus pocus. Brownfield has mapped out New York City’s complexity, and he uses it as a guide for his day to day activities. The rest of the graphic novel details Heller’s apprenticeship and its fallout in his daily life, and it ends with their efforts to implement a major correction before a disaster befalls New York City.

This is a highly recommended read. If you’re a fan of Archaia, you know the drill: a highly attractive, in this case embossed, hardback to beautify your bookshelves of pedestrian superhero tomes. Also, this is the ideal graphic novel to gift to non comic collectors, as it is conspicuously barren of hobby in-jokes and also spans the divide by appealing to pop science. Contemporary thought and rhetoric are peppered with terms from pop science, like complexity theory, or chaos theory, or “butterfly effect”; modern audiences are perhaps enthralled by the evolution of logic that is developing in the deconstruction of cause and effect, or perhaps they just take a Freudian fascination in losing themselves in Mandelbrot and Fibonacci fractals. In any event, the ideas in this book are not ephemeral and they will linger with the book’s readers.

The artist, Greg Scott, is a rock star here, using the cinematic vocabulary of the thriller genre to find suspense in an abstract plot which hinges on mathematical concepts. Given a page of talking heads to draw, he gives us a grid of expressive faces to frame that dialogue, and he prevents the exposition from becoming too pedestrian as the plot turns down this or that NYC street by drawing a New York that transcends the real and becomes familiar. At all times the pages, like the story, mirror the interconnected mundanity of life.

You can find Strange Attractors at comic shops, quality booksellers, and online at Amazon. It is also available digitally on comiXology, and you can preview the book on the Archaia website.

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Categories: Comics, Reviews
Tags: Archaia, BOOM!, Chaos Theory, Charles Soule, Complexity Theory, Greg Scott, Strange Attractors