Friday, August 20, 2010

Beanworld Book 3: Remember Here When You Are There

One-sentence summary: A genuinely unique comic experience, Beanworld is, I imagine, appealing to a very select audience of which happily I am a part.

Larry Marder's Beanworld has an odd history. Having begun years ago, it took a decade long hiatus as Marder went more behind-the-scenes in the comic world, and then joined with Dark Horse in re-releasing the old Beanworlds (which were Books 1 and 2 of this series) and has (yay) started creating new Beanworld tales, this being the first.

An introduction to what Beanworld is like: the genre listed on its back is "graphic novel/ecological fantasy" and that is actually pretty accurate. The long-form story of Beanworld is really about finding out how the world in which it exists works, with the individual episodes revealing some small aspect, or history (though it is, generally, a very linear story with very few flashbacks, and almost no whole episodes ever taking place in the past. We learn the history through the oral tradition of the Beans themselves).

What's most remarkable about all this is that it works. There are odd depths to Beanworld, and ultimately it's a story about stories; in a very Campbellian way, it is about mythology, but instead of being about individual stories or arcs (e.g., the Hero's Journey) it is about the reasoning and formation of an entire mythology.

I'm intrigued to see how Marder adjusts to writing 200-page stories as compared to 22-page ones. In this volume things still seem relatively episodic, but subplots tend to be more apparent than they ever were in the individual stories, and begin to emerge to true plot-dom. To me, it's fascinating that as the world in which this story-about-stories grows, the medium which is used to tell it grows as well.

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