Starhenge Book 2 #2 // Review
Time has little meaning except when it’s quiet. That’s when it matters. That’s when things get most dangerous. The stillness. The silence. Where machines come to die. It’s easy to oblige them. But lately....lately there have been troubling intrusions. Visions. A face that’s not quite seen. And the face might look familiar. There might well be something beyond that in the dreamy fugure of Starhenge Book 2 #2. Writer/artist Liam Sharp continues a deliciously nebulous story involving horrors, fears, bravery and childhood. The narrative might feel a bit disconnected in places, but once again a narrative begins to assert itself in another interesting issue.
Elsewhere, the big, ugly demon with a million teeth is approaching a boy. It’s warning him not to obstruct it. “You must come with us,” it says. “This is no longer your world.” Naturally, it’s a bit of a disturbing sort of a situation for the kid, but he’s not scared. The boy tells the monster that its breath really stinks. He tells it that it should really brush its teeth, evven if it takes all day. And of course...given the fact that the thing has a million teeth, there IS a pretty good chance of that. The kid’s got a lot to learn, but he doesn’t need to learn bravery. That seems to come quite natural to him.
Sharp’s narrative is as weird and dreamy as ever. The weird, nightmarish sort of surrealism that seems to resonate through the entire story is great fun in its own way, but it’s really, really difficult to pbuild-up much of an attachment to the whole thing emotionally without a clearer and mre. rationally grounded narrative. As it is, the nebulosity of the narrative lacks enough gravity to build-up much of any kind of emotional connection to what it is that’s going on in the story. The surrealism is fun, though.
There IS an emotional connection tot hew story of the second issue in the seecond book in the series, though. That emotional connection comes in the form of the visual presentation of the story...particularly as it pertains to the boy. The visuals teeter and toddle between a kind of horrific darkness and a child-like rendering of childhood nightmares. There’s also some photorealism going on that suggests a fusion between nightmares, childhood drawings and photography. It’s a distinctively appealing kind of visual darkness that makes it to the page.
The story continues. It’s really one that would appear to work better in trade paperback frm once it’s finished. The monthlong wait between chapters and the brevity of those chapter feels like it interrupts the dreamy overaching rhythm of the story. There’s definitely a form and pattern to the story that would feel much more concrete and vital in a longer form rpesentation. As it is, the episodic format doesn’t do the narrative any avors. That being said, the staccato nature of the single issue format DOES amplify the weird and dreamy surrrealism of individual scenes.
