Gunnerkrigg Court: A Review

I'm probably the worst person to review a graphic novel, especially one being released serially on the web.  I'm a book-guy.  And not just any book will do.

I've got a couple of friends who were in Josh Neufeld's award winning A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, so I got to following the industry a little bit, sort of like you follow horse-racing, with a spasmodic glassy-eyed disinterest.  But I don't pretend to expertise in its values and goals.  I was reading because I Knew Somebody Famous, at least famous among the sorts of people who read graphic novels of topical interest.

But a student turned me on to Gunnerkrigg Court. (Thanks, Victoria: you rock, you myth-monger.)

Tom Siddell writes and draws the thing.Kat Flies Over the Court With Annie. Copyright Tom Siddell. Used by Permission

He incorporates a good deal of myth from across the human spectrum and dabbles in alchemy (a bit of a specialty of mine).

I have criticisms, of course.

The most important is that it's for smart, hip young semi-literates, those teens and young adults who are smart enough to want to know things but who get most of their information from Google or Wikipedia.  There's little depth to the references and little sophistication of language (even where his characters could be expected to have some).

The characterization is creative and engaging, but the dialogue sometimes feels forced. 

The art isn't all first-rate and sometimes downright inert, though I think that's because Siddell wields his pen like Bob Dylan plays his own guitar: he wants to tell his own story, and if sometimes the art is too cartoonish and lifeless (the first twenty pages or so I was only reading to oblige my student), it's honest and organically related to the story Siddell wants to tell.  And just when you feel it's becoming too cloying, the art explodes in a flurry of genuine adventuresome creativity or quietly provides some unexpectedly true textures to a scene.Annie and Kat Watch a Film From The Court's History. Copyright Tom Siddell. Used by Permission

Then too, some story arcs go unexplained too long to sustain interest (at least when you're waiting for a week for one page of panels to come out).

But all that's mostly niggling. 

The reason I want to blog about Gunnerkrigg Court tonight is that, having been introduced to it, I spent three hours reading it without pause, looked up and found that it was three in the morning.

Tom Siddell's triumph really strikes me as being the tone of the thing.  His story metaphorizes the genres of fantasy and science fiction through setting.  The story is set in an apparently-boundless hyper-technos environment that shuts out any hint of nature or spirit, replacing it with technology and dystopian concrete-and-steel architecture.  But a chasm separates it from the ethereal world of spirit and myth.

But that world itself has its own considerable ambiguities and betrayals, and Siddell trusts his imagination enough not to shy away from them.  It would be tempting for a lot of writers to say (with James Cameron's Avatar) "tech-bad, nature-good," but I think Siddell is more interested in saying, "Tech and nature, superego and id, body and spirit reflect what you bring to them and become what you make them," and this saves him from many a cliché.

The juxtaposition of material reality with spiritual / mythic realities reminds me a little of George MacDonald, an old favorite of mine. 

It gives the characters a wide range, and I found myself quickly caring about what happened to them in spite of the sometimes-clichéd dialogue.Annie In The Trickster's World of Spirit and Dream. Copyright Tom Siddell. Used by Permission.

It's a fruitful and promising concept, predating the superficially similar themes of Avatar, which is slicker and more violently exciting and more compressed, less brooding, less interested in its own characters, less subtle, and less likely to hang around in my imagination.

Gunnerkrigg Court is at its best when the story enters a dark if not demonic reality that only one or two characters can adequately sense.  There, it's not so glib, and it explores more deeply what it wants to say about the world that Siddell has created and which he seems to see as part of the potential of the human spirit.

It's interesting to me.  It might not be for everybody.  But give it twenty or thirty pages before you make up your mind, and see if a genre often counted as lead doesn't turn to gold for you.