This 3 volume series chronicles the flight of fancy of Edgar Allan Poe, through a realm of story, myth and fantasy as his imagination which has been separated from his mortal corpus in the form of the Dream Child struggles to restore the imbalance imposed upon the dream lands of Terra Somnium by the Nightmare King and find a way home back to his waking body, the Other, his Father.
STORY
While this review mainly focuses on the 3 and final volume of this series I will be relating to events and themes from across the whole of this tale to give proper context. The Dream Child, the imagination or poetic soul of Edgar Allen Poe has fallen from his body due to Poe’s despair over the loss of his life Virginia in reality. This has led to a great upheaval in the inner world of his imagination which also seems to represent the larger metaphysical idea of myth and story beyond the man himself but the cumulative idea of legend fabricated by humanity as a whole.
The landscape of this world is mostly peppered with references to Poe’s works, life and passions as one would reasonably expect, because after all, this IS his dream. Within this frame there is the idea that is satisfied by the end that dreams and indeed life are a heaven or hell of our own making. Author MacPherson does a fine job of leading the reader on a journey through this series invokes shades of CS Lewis’s Narnia combined with the absurdly surreal visual abstractions of Tim Burton at the height of his powers. We are entreated to a darksome fairytale in the great European tradition of lessons to be learned but also that such stories, while there to offer equal parts wisdom and horror, can be an unreliable vehicle right until the very end of the tale.
It’s as rolicking an adventure as films like WIllow and The Corpse Bride, complete with thrills, intrigue, danger and tragic loss. Macpherson is a seasoned writer and he clearly has a passion for the personas of the 19th and 20th centuries as is evidenced by his work here and past work involving illusionist Harry Houdini. For the most part this is successful, the story is fun and engaging and the pacing moves along crisply, gathering momentum as it moves towards its finale. I do have some questions, however, about narrative structure at times as I find some pages require a second look. At times the story jumped from scene to scene without a proper set up as to why I was seeing what was on a particular page. Perhaps it’s meant to because of dream logic, but even so that doesn’t excuse such a jarring transition. This is not a deal breaker as the overall story is concise enough to follow but this was an issue I mostly noticed in volume 3. The previous volumes felt more concise and perhaps better planned out.
ART
The art across the three volumes is for the most part quite good, with volume 1 and 3 being the best, volume 2 suffers a bit from some of the art not being equal to the overall aesthetic featured throughout the story. Legge and Torres work well together to deliver clear artwork that catches the eye and tells the tale. Legge’s page layouts go from function from a storytelling point of view to quite imaginative in the best way. This really sells the dreamy tone of the book and I enjoyed his creativity in this regard. The pages were easy to read and flowed well and Torres’s colors add clarity and enhancement to the line art.
LETTERS
Legge also handled the lettering chores for this volume and I do have some issues here. While most of the comic’s speech bubble placement and letters are just fine, Legge seems to have a grasp for the basic artistry needed for lettering, about halfway through my copy for some inexplicable reason the font size was reduced to about half size. This issue continued to the end of the book and would change from page to page. Mind you, I’m reading this on an iPad Pro with a 12.9 in screen and in portrait mode. So for me these pages are equivalent to holding a floppy in my hands. I really shouldn’t need to zoom in or squint to read this. Don’t know if this was a formatting issue or a choice. To me it looked as if there was plenty of room on the panels to continue to have the text remain consistent throughout the book.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This is a fun book and it is a love letter to fans of Poe, story and myth and is well worth reading. There are some hiccups along the way that keep it from being a perfect experience but nothing that should prevent you from adding this wonderful series to your collection. Recommended.
SCORE: 3.75 out of 5
WRITER: Dwight L MacPherson
ARTIST: Steven Legge
COLORS: Emmanuel Ordaz Torres
LETTERS: Steven Legge
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