Expunging Bile: Black Lung

There are some stories that need to be told by cartoonists. The ideas are so compelling, so wonderful, that the stories flow out of them, as though the story was writing itself. Chris Wright's Black Lung is not such a story. Instead, it feels more like a cancerous tumor that had to be excised from Wright's imagination in order to finally free him of it.Wright's grotesque character design that was so unsettling and fascinating in his Inkweed collection is still at play here, as his characters are huge, lumpy, bulbous men with sausage fingers and weird tufts that make up their hair. It's like they're a race of aliens or monsters in human clothing, with the stories set in a vaguely 19th century milieu. This is an era of sailing ships and piracy, but there's little romance in this story.Wright unleashes the full power of his dense artwork to create a relentlessly grim and oppressive story that is at times a pitch-black satire of both reason and faith.

There's a fairly wide cast of characters, but it essentially settles on three men: a vicious local thug named Mose, a dark-hearted pirate captain named Brahm and a refined but troubled teacher named Isaac. The first third of the book, though rough and tumble, is light-hearted when compared to the rest of the book. There are bar fights, kids run amok, cases of mistaken identity, schemes and various other forms of seedy shenanigans. Wright's ultra-dense use of hatching and cross-hatching creates an oppressive atmosphere, but it's one that nonetheless feels entirely alive. The bars, restaurants and streets feel like dirty, grim and real places. That powerful solidity of place is crucial when Isaac accidentally ends up in a bar full of men set to ambush Mose and have him conscripted to Brahm's crew. Isaac sticks out ridiculously in this setting, making his kidnapping by pirates almost a comedy of errors.

The humor of the book, such as it is, gets even darker once aboard the pirate ship. Mose quickly adapts to life as part of the crew and takes Isaac under his wing. The crew is full of murderous psychopaths, degenerates and the insane. Under Brahm's command, they ruthlessly pillage and plunder other ships. There's an almost relaxed, quotidian quality about the second third of the book, as Wright leisurely introduces us to the rest of the cast and the reader gets a sense of what daily life is like. Of course, daily life is horrible and dangerous, especially for someone as soft as Isaac, but that's part of the book's appeal. He is able to make himself useful by reading books to Brahm, and the two slowly develop an intellectual and philosophical rapport.

Brahm does what he does because the two women he loved and their unborn children were technically heathens, and thus in hell. Rationally, with the presupposition that god is real, Brahm reasons that if he lives as wicked and awful a life as possible, he is sure to rejoin his loved ones in hell. That logic is twisted but entirely sound, and Isaac reveals that he teaches poor children because he was kicked out of his last job for having an affair with a student, and then mistreated her afterwards. The final third involves Brahm leading his crew to a raid on a fort with a massive treasure and then disappearing. This part of the book is a real Heart of Darkness moment, one where morals, ethics and society utterly break down in savagery, with each man having to decide for himself what is good and evil. In the end, Isaac is left alone on an island, perhaps as punishment but more likely as a sort of reward from Brahm, an opportunity for his own redemption. Whether or not Brahm has found his own redemption through evil deeds is left up to the reader to decide, but it's remarkable what a well-rounded and even sympathetic character he becomes in Wright's hands. This is a book about a lot of mens' dark nights of the soul writ large (and bloody), and Wright offers no easy answers for any of them.

Sequart #174: Inkweed

Here's a review of one of Sparkplug's best-ever releases, Chris Wright's Inkweed. This was originally published at sequart.com
**

The last book I'm reviewing in the latest wave of releases from top-notch boutique publisher Sparkplug Comic Books is Inkweed, by Chris Wright. Publisher Dylan Williams once again provides a platform for an artist with a distinctive voice and style, collecting stories from a number of different places into one thematic whole. The gestalt of Wright's work may be as fully-formed as I've ever seen from a relatively young artist, with the stylistic choices he makes fitting in perfectly with his themes. The result is a comic that is unnerving, uncomfortable and relentlessly compelling. His work is one of contradiction: his figures are grotesque but majestic, scratchy yet imaginatively designed, and monstrous but recognizably human. Wright employs a scratchy, dense line jammed with cross-hatching and shadow. His figures are often distorted but expressive, and he never sacrifices clarity for effect. His use of gesture and body language makes his characters recognizably human even if they don't quite appear to be. The oddness of his figures is especially given context with the way he uses the eyes of his characters to guide the reader.


Wright's themes overlap, and he cleverly arranged the stories in the book such that one theme led to another. The first story, "The Unmerciful Gift", is about an artist who can no longer paint works that others can see--they simply look like blind canvases. The story is about sacrifice, obsession and the ultimate futility of that pursuit. Here, Wright's cross-hatching creates an emotional weight, a density where there is no relief for the reader. Wright observes obsession from a different point of view in "Tapestry", about an aging astronomer who desperately reaches out to his young female assistant. The desperation is not born simply out of loneliness, but out of the terror of his increasing realization of his insignificance in the face of the infinite. In the end, she leaves and he has no choice but to continue to try to chart the abyss that he studies every night. The way Wright contrasts the astronomer's bravado by day (asserting how much more scientists now understand) with his terror at night was the story's master stroke.

"Snake" and "Truth" both look at love from different points of view. The first as a form of temptation that no one can avoid, and the second as an actively pernicious force that we nonetheless are endlessly drawn to. In both tales, Wright creates a vaguely mythical, fairy-tale type background for the stories. Those two shorter stories prepare for the true gut-punch of the collection, "Urn". It's Wright's most devastating and masterful short story, with an introduction that piques interest and warns us that tragedy is ahead, but the reader could not possibly be prepared for what was to come. The story is about "love", but it's really about the many things we call love that are really something else. It's about guilt, lies, self-hatred, self-deception and the way all of these things come home to roost in the end. The most devastating part of the story is that the most despicable character is also the only fully truthful one.


Inkweed is also about creation and destruction, slipping between the stories of gods and artists. "The Sea Demon" essentially presents a set of dilemmas not unlike faced by the other artists in the book. "Rags and Turpentine" is interesting because it features one of the few characters in the book that is at the height of his creative powers, only he doesn't know it. An artist in love (or probably lust), he's conflicted by his desire for a woman who is also an artist and the possibility that he doesn't even like her work. Like many of the characters in Inkweed, the artist character gets drunk as a response to his surroundings. The loopy panel design reflects his wobbly orientation. Wright balances the philosophical, probing nature of his stories with visceral, earthy concerns that often put the lie to many of the characters' beliefs.


That tension between mind and body is at the heart of Wright's stories. In particular, Wright gets at the disconnect between the two, as his characters don't always understand their own motivations or don't figure it out until it's far too late. Wright modulates pleasure and pain here, as there are many ridiculous, laugh-out-loud moments to go with the melancholy or horrific ones. The intersection between obsession and desire is painfully evoked by Wright's art, and his unusual character design sucks the reader into this world where "he who learns must suffer", where journeys of discovery come at a terrible price.