Backwash: Newly Discovered Comics - THE COMPLEAT (sic) MOONSHADOW

No, the "compleat" isn't a typo. It's actually written in the title.

Why? For what effect was it intended? I have no idea. Just another bizarre and irrational bit from the mind of J.M. DeMatteis - who, as I understand from reading this work, has a mind that you can't begin to understand. All you can do is sit and enjoy the fanciful ride that his stream of consciousness takes you on.

I discovered this book just a little while ago when I was perusing through a copy of 500 Essential Graphic Novels while killing some time at Barnes & Noble. It was a neat little book that had at least 10 recommended graphic novels for just about every genre you could think of, from the obvious ones like superhero and crime to the less obvious, like war, romance, fantasy, and sports.

Yep - sports. There are some odd folks out there that like sports so much that they don't just want to write books about them. They want to make comics about them.

While flipping through the "fantasy" listing, I came upon some really obvious suggestions.

FABLES? Already read.

THE SANDMAN? Reading comics for years and not having read any of The Sandman is like going out in the rain and not getting wet.

BONE? I was beginning to think the listing wasn't going to throw me one.

But then I saw the listing for MOONSHADOW. I had never even heard of it. And judging from the description, it sounded like I should have. The review claimed that while Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN is the most popular fantasy comic in the industry, MOONSHADOW is truly the pinnacle of the form.

One can't hear a review like that and not have his curiosity piqued. I immediately added to my list of reserves at the local library. A few days later it popped up, I picked it up, and I set to work in reading the 450 page text heavy monster.

The first thing I noticed was how distinct the storytelling was. The comic featured a text-heavy prose narration. I'm not usually fond of a style like that - my philosophy is that the writer should usually back off from the pictures as much as possible; letting the still images breathe unoccluded by talky talky prose. But this book was certainly an exception. The narration exudes a unique charisma that is rare to find even in novels. It's almost as if Douglas Adams, author of the excellent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, traded his irony and wit for sentimentalism and got ambitious about writing a meandering ongoing comics narrative after reading Alan Moore's The Ballad of Halo Jones.

Despite the talky-talkiness of the work, there was still a perfect synergy between DeMatteis's prose narration and Jon J. Muth's beautiful watercolor artwork. Some of the most powerful scenes in the book are actually where DeMatteis's narrator shuts up entirely, giving us a sequence of wordless panels that have the awkwardness and tension of a cocktail party going deathly silent.

As for the comparison to Gaiman's Sandman, MOONSHADOW touched me in a way that The Sandman had not. MOONSHADOW takes place in a world much like ours, except it seems to be populated by giant, omnipotent happy faces that zoom and zip around the galaxy, performing extraordinary feats that dont' seem to correlate with each other. The story is about a wide-eyed young boy,who was raised on one of these happy face's intergalactic zoo, heading out an intergalactic expedition, where he will experience adventure, love, hate, sex, death, as well as explorations of who God is. This sets quite a contrast to The Sandman's main character, Dream, who was dull, unadventurous, and stoic. Also, while the book feels like a work of classic fairytale fiction, the surrealistic elements and fantasy characters seem fully unique and non-referential.

The only criticism I can level on it is that the ending is rather disappointing, cutting off much of the momentum and symbolic exploration that was progressing through the story. I suspect what may have happened was that DeMatteis and Muth expected to keep going and tell the story in 20 issues or so, when all of a sudden they got a phone call from Marvel (despite the collection edition being published by Vertigo, it was Marvel that initially published the book in the mid 80's) saying the sales numbers weren't high enough to justify the series. I don't know if this was the case for sure, but that's the only justification I can hypothesize for why a creative team with such a coherent vision would prematurely end the book in such a blunderous fashion.

Your local library might have this. Check it out. While it's totally reasonable to be weary of paying 40 bucks for a book like this, there's no reason to pass up something like this for free.