New to Image Comics this February, comes Meredith McClaren’s enchanting fantasy Hinges.
Written and drawn by McClaren, the graphic novel introduces the nuts and bolts of a city called Cobble, where one girl new to the city, Orio, must depend on help wherever she can find it. Her assigned familiar, Bauble, has his own agenda however. As the two explore the walls of the city, they find they are not the only new arrivals.
Visually, McClaren had thought about creating a world inhabited by dolls, puppets, and stuffed animals for a few years before a story was even attached to the idea. “Later on I came to Orio, and her growth. The idea of working with dolls meant I could explore a person’s development into an individual (from a completely blank slate to a fully realized person) on a much more expedient track then watching a character physically grow up.”
The world in Hinges acts as a character in and of itself in many ways. McClaren added: “I also wanted to play with a world that had a lot of ambiguity. When I look back at the stories I love—the ones that tend to have a more enduring presence—I always come back to the type of stories where the audience isn’t given the full explanation but rather a great big sandbox of a world that they can also play with. It’s been my observation that the stories people enjoy most are the ones in which they feel they can also participate. I wanted to give my audience that kind of experience. I love it when my audience starts to develop their own theories for why the world of Hinges is the way it is. And I would be ridiculously pleased should some of them find their own stories to tell there.”
Hinges Book One: Clockwork City (ISBN: 978-1-63215-253-4) hits shelves on 2/25 and will be available for $15.99. It can be pre-ordered by retailers from Diamond Book Distributors with Diamond Code DEC140649.
