Early review: Swan Songs #1 sets the tone for a unique emotional journey
When it comes to W. Maxwell Prince comics, “weird” doesn’t cut it. From Ice Cream Man to HaHa, strangeness and weirdness are just the first few pages. From there they pivot hard into less traveled territory, a place of in-betweens and unstable angles that often deal in raw and painful emotions. I like to refer to Prince’s work as emotional Twilight Zones. They can be brutal, bruising, darkly sweet, and outright terrifying.
His latest anthology, Swan Songs, goes down the same path, but this time the emotional anchor lodges itself into the concept of endings (hence the title). Issue #1, fully painted by Martin Simmonds (Department of Truth), cracks the spine of the series open with a tender and frightening tale about the apocalypse coupled with the care of a terminally sick parent. It tugs at the more sensitive parts of the soul, and then it adds pain and love to leave a lasting mark on the reader.
Swan Songs will feature a new artist each issue, among them Caspar Wijngaard, Filipe Andrade, Caitlin Yarsky, collage-artist Alex Eckman-Lawn, and Martín Morazzo. The first story, titled “The end of…the world,” follows a young guy that braves a broken-down cityscape in search of a Better Home Magazine before an atomic bomb destroys all life as they know it. His mom, who is bedridden in a near-empty hospital, loves listening to her son read to her from the magazine. The young man wants to indulge his mom one last reading session before the final curtain falls.
One way to approach Maxwell Prince stories is by taking them as emotional puzzles. It’s not that you’re required to make specific pieces fit into place to make sense of the story. Rather, your experience will hinge on how you connect certain story sequences together at a deeper level, taking into account what drives each character to engage with their world. In Swan Songs, this thought exercise is perhaps more guided than Maxwell Prince’s previous work thanks to a strong sense of finality that permeates throughout each page.
Urgency becomes a crucial storytelling device thanks to that focus on endings. Martin Simmonds visuals are a large part of the reason for this, especially in terms of scope. Simmonds takes care to foster an acute sense of impending doom that carries through each page. The city the man runs through in his desperate search looks like it’s ready to collapse under its own weight. Background characters and other signs of life project resignation, whereas buildings and roads look like they’re usefulness has run out. It’s as if everyone and everything in the story knows it’ll all truly end once the comic reaches its final page.
Simmonds’ use of muted colors mixed in with darker shades of reds becomes an integral part of the story’s emotional palette. The setting is made to look like it was hopeless and unsalvageable way before the atom bomb ever threatened to end all life. It creates an interesting contrast with the young man’s mission of finding the last Better Home magazine for his mom.
Horror is allowed to set in as well, especially with the presence of emotional vampires that threaten to block the man’s progression. They help populate a dark world that’s already signed its death warrant and they allow readers to connect even more emotional dots between the main situation and the other concerns that hover around it.
Swan Songs #1 sets the tone for a unique emotional journey that hopes to unsettle with the intention of getting at harder but necessary interpretations of our relationship with the end. There’s melancholy and there’s pain, confusion and frustration, but also the possibility of hope should the individual find it within him or herself to see certain things all the way to their conclusion. And yet, none of this is telegraphed to the reader. You don’t read Swan Songs for answers. You read it for the questions it’ll make you ask. Whatever answers you find are entirely yours.
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince Artist: Martin Simmonds Letterer: Good Old Leon
Story: 10 Art: 10 Overall: 10
Recommendation: Read and then stare into nothingness and let it all sink in
Release date: July 5, 2023
Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review
