Author Immortal #5 // Review
The Harlequin King sustains his kingdom by feasting on his own people. Al wants to change this. It's not something that's going to be easy to do. Al is, after all, and outsider. The world is fundamentally messed up. But it's messed up in a way if that seems fundamental to the structure of the social order of things. Al is convinced that things can be changed, though. Of course, things become much more complicated as the first book ends for Author Immortal. Writer Frank J, Barbiere and artist Morgan Beem wrap-up the first major plot arc for the series in its fifth issue.
“F---ing Insane!” That’s how the author describes it. He’s riding high in the sky on the back of a gryphon, so it’s understandable that he’s going to be more than a little terrified. The warrior woman he’s riding on the back of the creature with is considerably less frightened. She’s guiding the beast and the author to the Harlequin Court where the real challenge begins. Meanwhile, Al is unsettled. A blonde haired woman with black eyes gestures to him with long, thin, black fingers. She's speaking about a time for told. A time when all will be brought into the ink.
There is a considerable amount of poetry in the fantasy that Barbiere is binding to the page. There’s real power in the uniquely conflicted relationship between author and story--artist and art. There are a lot of other things going on in the plot. However, the central connection there is very powerful. There are aspects and elements that Barbiere is playing with which detract a bit from the central core of the story’s power. It might simply be a case that Barbiere is simply trying to cram too much story into two small a frame.
There's a hauntingly fantasma sketchiness about the art which rests within a water colory fugue on the page. The sketches of the visuals twist and turn around on the page under the weight of the script. Here and their dramatic moments are held with a particularly appealing sense of drama. These moments exist within long stretches of particularly restless energy, which rolls across the page. It all feels so stagnant, but it's clearly lurching forward towards something. And what it's lurching forward towards hits the page like a dream turned into a nightmare that didn't quite materialize on the page without entering some kind of fog.
The muted impact of some of the more serious intense moments in the first book feels a little weird. The dreaminess of the story seems to be overcoming the potentially explosive power of some of the moments which are captured in the final issue of the first book. Author Immortal hold some pretty intriguing, possibilities and potentials as it closes out its first book. It feels like there is still so much more story to be placed on the page and still so much world building to be done around the edges of everything.
