Swan Songs #1 // Review
The rain is coming down. There are cars overturned in the street. People are rioting. Somewhere in the midst of it all is a sign that read: “Jesus Saves.” There’s a woman in a hospital bed reading a magazine above it all. Feels like she’s on her deathbed. Feels like the end of the world. This is the beginning of the first issue of Swan Songs. It’s an anthology series about the end featuring the writing of W. Maxwell Prince. It’s a different end every issue. It’s a different artist every issue. The series opens with the end of the world as drawn by Martin Simmonds.
The woman’s son is talking about going out to pick up a magazine. Like THAT makes any sense at the end of the world. (Like anything does.) Her son’s ready to leave the hospital as she falls asleep. It’s a tall place. The elevator is out. Sign on the elevator says it’s out of order because it’s the end of the world. He’s really planning on heading out to the apocalypse to get a magazine for his mother. She’s got renal failure. He has to walk through the subway to get anywhere. An old man nearly attacks him, looking for Percocets. It’s going to be a long trip out to get magazines for Mom.
Prince has a poetic sense of darkness. It bleeds out of the narration of the issue in gentle blooms of shadow. It’s a simple idea: the world is coming to an end, but this guy’s therapist (before he was trampled to death in the apocalypse) always used to say: baby steps. You can’t change the world, so you look for what you CAN do. So the world is ending, and this guy takes the readers on a tour through the end of the world as he goes to get his mom a gardening magazine. Poetic stuff in its own way.
There’s a great sense of emotional resonance in the story that’s brought to life in a darkened light by Simmonds’s art. Rather than glorify the end of the world, he’s showing it in slow decay as Prince lets the clock tick down to the end of everything. It’s not pretty, but there’s no reason to make it look like any more of a horror than it already is. It’s an earthbound darkness as everything decays until the mushroom cloud wipes everything out in the splash page at the end of the issue. Pretty stuff. And incredibly dark.
Prince and Simmonds have put something together that has a kind of purity rarely granted to an end of any kind on the comics page. There have been a lot of ends of the world in a lot of different comics, but they’ve always been marred by the trivialities that come from ongoing series or the restless introduction of every new beginning. Prince and Simmonds open their series on the end with a simple, open embrace of the end of the world. It’s kinda cool.
