If you have just joined the story of A Distant Soil with its relaunch this year,it is understandable if you are overwhelmed. After all, your first chapter of the narrative was the energetic and tooth-jarring climax of the story in issues 39 and 40, which depicted the gory coup on Ovanan. To long time fans, this was a cathartic moment, and it might seem a little beyond belief to new fans, more accustomed to traditional serial fiction and sequential superhero comics, that the villains of the piece could be disposed of with such finality; but A Distant Soil, like a novel is composed of irreversible events, and like a symphony is composed of definite movements.
Issue 41 is a lull in the score. The victorious resistance regroup and take a cruise through defeated Ovanan. Suddenly, after the frenetic decapitations and seizing of the reigns of power that occupied the previous issue, the heroes are even more alive as they curse like sailors and make the best jokes that they can with bloodstained hands. The events of the previous issues really sink in, and our heroes puke their guts out, insult each other, and otherwise bond. Much of it is comedy: some of it is black comedy (their hapless pilot dodges the bodies of Ovanan overlords that are pushed from tower heights), and some is light hearted (the “big red button” on Ovanan airships controls the windshield wipers), but all of it is tinged with absurdity. Doran uses the change in tone to reintroduce her characters and bring the reader closer to the heart of the story. In this way, Doran uses anticlimax like a master of postmodernism.
Great storytellers are as much “soulsmith” as wordsmith, crafting people that you get to know as you read. In a visual medium like comics, the Zeus-like ability to breathe life into your characters is at least on a par with the Zen-like ability to make words breathe light into your readers, and Doran’s gift for drafting realistic dialogue in a fantasy tableau is only a little upstaged by her masterful illustrations that are part tattoo and part tapestry.
A Distant Soil 41 is highly recommended. You can request it from your local comic shop, and it is available digitally on comiXology. The previous chapters of the story can be sampled on Colleen Doran’s website.
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