A word, then, for the pamphlet comic book. Oh, you groan, that old thing. Didn’t we dump that by the wayside?
Well, we did, sort of. They still make them, you know. Yes, the new superhero comics can feel a bit thin between the fingers. Buffered only by house ads, put together on computers so you don’t get that wonderful tactile dimension of a physical paste-up for the letters page or the Bullpen Bulletins. All this is true.
And yet. They still make them. Lots of them, new shipment every Wednesday. Sometimes Tuesday now. It almost seems as if they had to murder the pamphlet for it become interesting again, but there are still people putting a lot of work into the format.
Case in point, our subject for today, Hexagon Bridge, a five-issue miniseries recently completed from Image; a collected edition is forthcoming in May. The artist, Richard Blake, arrives in comics fresh from the world of commercial art - that is, without a great deal of advance hype. The first time I encountered his work was seeing a copy of Hexagon Bridge #1 on the shelf of my shop. At one glance, it stomped on my foot and demanded I take it home with me, and I’m certainly glad I did, because it didn’t really look like anything else on the stands, leastways not in this country.
The project is science fiction, but not sci-fi action. There is, I believe, one explosion in the series; it comes out of nowhere and isn’t even properly explained. It’s primarily a story about exploration, reaching out into the profound unknown. Spoiler alert, there are no scary boogums at the other end of the space bridge. Intimations of malevolence are sidestepped. Mysteries can sometimes be resolved without the use of ray guns, as scandalous a notion as that might appear. Sometimes the uncanny is just unknowable, but that doesn’t have to be coded for horror.
Blake has put a lot of thought into how the book would appear on shelves. The cream cover backdrop underlines the minimalist intent, clean Helvetica announcing title and author. I think that’s Helvetica. It feels like Helvetica, or some homebrew variant. A statement of purpose, that cover design: this is a thoughtful book, with a devoted quietude crouched at the center like a lotus flower.
As I said, Hexagon Bridge is about exploration, but not on any set of terms we can readily understand; much of the series is devoted to explicating a more difficult-to-explain set of concepts. At some point around 2,000 years in the future, a bridge opens on Earth to somewhere else. Not another planet, nor even another physical space. It’s something more resembling a construct - definitely a constructed artifact, albeit one inherently wild and seemingly trackless. It calls for exploration, even as it strains the comprehension of those tasked with the studying.
This a familiar setup, if you’re familiar with sci-fi: exploring spaces that may defy our limited mortal comprehension. Learning how to interface with intelligence on a different order of magnitude than our own are notions at the heart of foundational texts such as 2001 and Solaris. They send in drones at first but eventually humans succumbed to the temptation, and are subsequently lost.
The two first humans through the breach are cartographers - a married team who leave a young daughter, Adley, behind them. Adley is our protagonist, and her life is dominated by the question of just what happened to her missing parents. She also happens to be a low-level psychic, which seems to be a separate matter from the whole business of the interdimensional bridge. It’s likely that Adley’s parents shared these tendencies, which explains their being drawn towards such risky fields as counterintuitive cartography. The only thing they know for certain is that there may or not be a character named "Gerardus" somewhere at the center of things, possibly even manipulating events on Earth for reasons that can only be guessed.
There’s another main character, an AI named Staden, created for the purpose of enabling further exploration of the bridge - specifically with an eye towards eventual search-and-rescue operations. This is where Adley’s psychic powers come in handy, as that’s the lynchpin on which hangs her rapport with Staden. It seems like there’s more to be told about Adley’s relationship with this robot created to help her explore another dimension, but it’s perhaps another story entirely.
There’s a lot on the table, in other words! Remarkable that the pacing feels as deliberate as it does, considering there’s so much area covered. But it’s two millennia in the future; most of what we see about the world is weird and unexplained. That’s to be expected. That people are still wearing shoes and hats is remarkable in itself.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Hexagon Bridge is that it is Blake’s first comic book. Took me aback when I saw that, I must admit! This is an assured debut, an ambitious story told with alacrity. High concept sci-fi is hard to pull off in any medium, and for a new author especially, such a steady, nuanced understanding of tone seems remarkable. If anything, this reader might have even liked a bit more in the way of exposition. I feel like no one cares for exposition anymore; everyone spends all their time trying to get it out of the way as painlessly as possible.
But this is a dry story, and it never loses that steady hand. It’s not really focused on machinery. Blake’s world of the future is one defined by unobtrusive industrial design, technology unexceptional and utilitarian in context. That understated vision is crucial to the whole project, from that gorgeous cover design on down.
Because at its core, the story serves as a vehicle for Blake’s visions of travel through strange spaces beyond our ken. There’s a European air here, do not doubt - that much is obvious just from the cover images themselves, the wonderfully pellucid design framing square snapshots of adventures beyond the bridge. There’s your Moebius, in that recitation of the vastness of space juxtaposed with the smallness of the human organism. The cover for issue four is especially nice: a lone figure atop a flying machine, tiny in context with an enormous mountain range. Pure romance, of the small “r” variety.
Blake knows how to draw, and well, or he wouldn’t be able to pull off such striking minimalism when he wants to. He’s good at gesture and body language, which help sell the world as a familiar, lived-in place. Staden is a robot who, when fully constructed, stands with the posture of a human being, with his hands in his pockets. Such remarkable characterization communicated with the alacrity of a glance.
Such a nice-looking comic, very thoughtfully constructed with a great mix of skill and ambition. Richard Blake came out of the Rhode Island School of Design sometime around the turn of the century, but he’s about as far from Fort Thunder as you can get. Someone worth paying attention to, in any event. I hope he does more, and soon.
