The Twilight Zone #9 // Review
He does the dance of daily life. It’s the sam thing over and over and over and over again. He dives into the water with a bucket to take soil from the bottom of the water. The bucket is emptied. Then he does it all again. He’s not the only one. And this isn’t the only day. The soil mining is the heart and soul of something which restlessly rests in The Twilight Zone #9. Writer/artist Juni Ba tells a story that’s both fantastic and mundane in equal measure. It doesn’t fit perfectly into the form or style of the franchise, but its heart engages the same spirit of the venerable title.
It’s easy for him to forget his own name doing all that he’s doing. There’s an elegant kind of respiration about it that finds him separated from the village in which he lives until all is finished for the day. It’s a simple existence, but there’s something out there on the horizon beyond everythign else...some central mystery at the core of it all that he might be missing as he contines to dive, dig and emerge with the soil beneath the water that sustains them all.
Ba works on a very small canvas for a story that echoes into deeper themes that seem to encompass and embrace the whole of human existence. It’s quite a journey from beginning to end. And while it doesn’t quite check all of the boxes that it needs to check in order to truly feel like a Twilight Zone story, it’s cool to see Ba experimenting with the franchise in a way that feels fresh and interesting. Some of what Ba is exploring here echoes some of the themes that he’d been exploring in his work on Monkey Island last summer.
Ba’s “A Day in the Life” story for Twilight Zone is a much more stern and serious sort of a mood about it than the work he’d done for Monkey Island. There’s a powerfully resonant feel of mythic intensity. There’s a powefully grim determination in the face of the main protagonist that reaches into the heart of human emotion. Some of the layout is quite impressive as well. The focus on the constant repetition of diving and collecting is matched in some of the vertically-alligned panels. There’s a constant sense of movement about the story that Ba captures quite well.
“A Day In the Life” might not fit perfectly into the Twilight Zone, but it’s nice to see that it can serve as a home for this kind of story. Honestly...there are aspects of a lot of Ba’s work that could find a home under the Twilight Zone title. It’s a franchise that wouldn’t have tremendous difficulty evolving. It HAS managed to bridge the gap from TV of different eras to a recent radio play series to a big screen motion picture to...pinball. Ba’s work is a nice addition to an evolving franchise that could develop into so much more than it’s already been.
