My goodness, but what a gorgeous book! Sitting here, mulling over just how to begin a review, that’s the note my brain keeps thrumming. Pick up the book, feel how heavy it is in your hand. Not a huge book, as these things go (it's 6" x 8"), but nevertheless a substantial book, wedged in your paw. The cover has attractive gold foil highlights, and the actual side of the pages—the “fore-edge” of the book, I believe—is also a wonderful lustrous gold. The whole thing is bathed in color, not a single centimeter left undecorated.
No small thing to note, in the context of a publishing industry dominated by bureaus of real and imagined existential worry: people still know how to make dynamite-looking books. The Chromatic Fantasy is a dynamite-looking book, and not just for being well-drawn - it’s a testament to the fact that the bookmaker’s art is alive and well in the 21st century. Silver Sprocket is the publisher, and their masthead here credits Carina Taylor as production designer, so before anything else it seems a good idea to compliment her, and the rest of the Silver Sprocket team, for putting their backs into making this a gorgeous comic book.
As for the rest of the book? Well, the artist goes by H.A., and the work in question is a thoroughly gorgeous love story with adventure beats and erotic interludes. It’s about two young men, Jules and Casper, who meet up in the great wide world and decide in a moment to become inseparable. If you want an example of just how clever the book can be, that sequence isn’t a bad place to start. Jules gets kicked out of a mountaintop cloister where, first, he becomes waylaid by a demon, cutting off his hair and running feral into the woods. From there he falls quite easily into a life and dissolution and debauchery, becoming a thief and a gambler and a lover, in his turn, before finally encountering Casper. He meets Casper while jumping out of a tree for the purpose of knocking Casper out and stealing his coins. What follows is a long sequence wherein Casper pulls his own sword in return and the two dashing bandits spend the next handful of pages trying to kill the other. But the two fighters appear evenly matched, and so the fury of survival quickly subsides into the slightly less furious back and forth of an extended duel. And then the slightly less furious back and forth becomes playful banter. And then, in the space of a few pages, the two erstwhile bandits are tucking their swords back into their scabbards and walking down the road side by side. From that moment the center of gravity in their lives has changed.
Do we still say “meet cute”? Well, we’ll say it here, at least, because it’s a legible idea - meeting the love of your life as a quirky little tale you might just be able to share with friends and acquaintances. As far as “meet cutes” go, one bandit waylaying another in the forest isn’t bad. If Casper had been just an increment slower he’d have almost certainly been knocked flat by the butt of Jules’ sword, but as it is, he’s damnably lucky to have sneezed at just the right moment to save his head. From there, literal sparks fly as swords cross.
If you’re thinking to yourself, hmmm, that all sounds quite resolutely sexual! Well, yes, indeed, that would rather seem to be the point. Get it? The “point”? I’m worried you might not get the inference. About the swordfight. Because it’s about homoeroetic tension, of the non-sapphic variety.
The Chromatic Fantasy indulges in euphemism not because it is necessary but because it is fun, and then when it wrings all the fun out of euphemism the characters take their clothes off and fuck. It’s not about leaving nothing to imagination so much as leaving no stone unturned. We can have both elaborate metaphors for fucking, and actual fucking. We can have a cornucopia of desire both real and imagined, all for the taking and all right there on the page.
But the last thing I’d want to do was leave you with the impression that the book is solely about fucking, because it really isn’t. The fucking is a crucial part, just as it’s a crucial part for most love stories, consummated or no. But the real plot, such as it is, kicks in with the understanding that neither Jules nor Casper enter the implacable gravity of the other with a clean slate. Both carry prior commitments of various stripes. Jules, for instance, made a deal with the devil prior to running away from the aforementioned cloister, cutting off his hair and leaving behind the trappings of a nun for the habits of a rake. The devil loves Jules, and there’s something quite delicious in seeing that popular calumny flipped so resolutely: of course trans people have the devil perched on our shoulders. We’re just more interesting. Certainly more interesting than the devils hanging on our every word.
Jules’ devil is a lover, and also a bit possessive. The devil enjoys the vicarious thrill of Jules living a life of wanton debauchery, but the moment, well - how do we put this so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of our readers? The moment the “F” word enters into the conversation—you know, F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S—things get a big dicey. Because the devil doesn’t want to have any part of that, and he’s not shy about asserting prerogative.
Good thing, for the purposes of dramaturgy, Casper has his own equal and opposite set of obligations. There’s a magical shipwreck in his backstory, whereafter he wakes up up on the shore of a distant land as a new person - shades of Twelfth Night, because of course. Casper comes of age as a court jester, and in that service finds himself in possession of a most dangerous weapon indeed: a joke so funny it kills everyone who hears it. Funny enough to kill the King, even. But don’t think the current Queen is ungrateful; she remembers full well who put her on the throne, and she’d very much like that joke written down on a piece of paper for her purposes, thank you very much. If not, she’s perfectly willing to resort to torture.
The tone throughout reminded me of another fantasy touchstone, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride - another story of real romantic ardor framed by relentless whimsy and anachronism. The most jarring moment in The Chromatic Fantasy involves neither queer identity nor homoerotic lust, but simply seeing Jules sleeping with his cell phone half-tucked under the pillow, as people are wont to do in high fantasy. There’s a dogged resistance to taking the fantasy seriously on its own terms that a small portion of the audience will probably find cloying, but which really only serves to highlight the true focal point of the story. There is a nucleus of our contemporary life at the heart of this seeming late medieval fantasia. Occasional references are thrown out to “Starbucks” and “health insurance” and “top surgery.” That cell phone with the maddening broken screen gives way later in the book to a bulky handset connected to the wall with a landline. Its a fantasy story, they can use whatever kind of telephone they like. They can drive around in a pink Cadillac for a stray panel if they’d like.
So, you know, The Princess Bride with intermittent bouts of hardcore gay sex between trans men. It really is a beautiful book, so wonderfully drawn. It appears to be drawn in pencil with digital color, and H.A. is capable of some truly remarkable effects. The most immediately breathtaking sequence, at least on first blush, actually doesn’t have any people: a monologue by the devil himself from the beginning of Part Four, taking the form of a brief tour of hell, dark caverns illuminated by pools of boiling lava—or is it blood?—curling down the side of a hideous mountain like organs unspooling from the guts of a murder victim. The pages flips past and we see the molten blood falling alongside vast towers of ivory bones, an edifice of pain built atop the greatest heap of tangled flesh the world has ever seen. All wringing out into a great ocean of boundless red.
Turn the page and find yourself lost in fields of blues and teals. The cultivated landscapes of a royal garden party, a universe away from the hard caverns of hell - but not really, of course. H.A. knows how to draw so well that it seems remarkable to learn that this is his first finished comic. It's is a very confident piece of work, more or less the complete package - not just broad strokes color design, but finely detailed caricature and gestural expression as well. It’s also an excellent story, and well-paced. Frankly executed with an embarrassment of wit and brio. There’s even a cat involved, who knows how to swing a sword in the non-metaphorical sense. I’d talk about him more, but you should probably just go read the book yourself so you can see how cool the cat dude is for yourself.
If I wanted to talk about just how delightful every single element of this book is we’d probably be here all day. As it is, you should probably just take my word for it: The Chromatic Fantasy is a real humdinger. You’ll want a copy on your shelf, most likely, unless you’re boring. And who wants to be boring anymore?
