Starhenge Book 2 #1 // Review
A man walks into the city. he does this three times per week. The walk always lasts something liek three and a half hours. Recently he’s found his walks haunted by vague, unwanted intrusions...phantoms of the past that he can’t quite grasp. Thus begins another beautifully dense journey into narrative poetry in Starhenge Book 2 #1. Writer/artist Liam Sharp lovingly hand-painted poetry collects itself onto page and panel in dreamy coagulations that almost seem to be sort of telling some sort of a coherent story in a way. But maybe not. It’s an opening of a whole new chapter in the series that is gorgeously vague in its specificity.
And then there’s the story of an artist. A painter. An artist who dreams of a castle that she keeps in her head. There’s the narrative of a woman and her relationship with Verbatim City. There are strange thoughts out of some sort of heroic fantasy, but there’s also a kind of horror there. The dream seems to speak some kind of truths which cross eons, but there’s something more in it. Something that seems to be seeking to look into the nature of art and artifice and something more.
Sharp assemblesat all on the page with an interesting sense of pacing. Stories rap within stories that seem to be other stories entirely. Somewhere into the conscious must be on the page. And there's an interesting interaction between the text and the visuals. But it feels more like an illustrated poem than anything. It seems to be searching for its own form. And in searching for its own form, it seems to have arrived at its own form. Above all their business sense of a quest for some kind of meaning. It's just too bad that there isn't more of a skeleton underneath all of the beauty.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the visuals. Work with silhouettes. I work with low red reproductions that feel very much like something out of an old cat. I would rate tube. Ghost images from somewhere else entirely. Strange Prince and stranger printings. Some of it looks quite beautiful. And the overall composition on the page is very well fought out. There's a strange mix of photo realism with some very primal and primary shapes. There's an ongoing motif involving raindrops and puddles. That might be orbit, maps or strange radiations. It's all quite deliciously nebulous, though.
The abstraction is fun. And there is a deeper plot going on in a bit is picking up where the last series left off. But it doesn't really seem to want to embrace a whole lot of form. So it's kind of difficult to really engage in it on any kind of a logical or methodical level. The dreamlike nature of the storytelling continues to feel very restless. And then, it's just plain weird. A lot going on. And it seemed to be speaking to something deeper than it is. But it's kind of hard to tell at this stage.
