Friday, August 22, 2014

SIN TITULO by Cameron Stewart



Cameron Stewart is a fantastic artist.  He came out of nowhere, for me, when he worked with Grant Morrison on Sea Guy.  I loved his clean style and ability to convey emotions through a limited amount of lines.  Seriously, great work.

So, when I discovered he was doing a webcomic, titled SIN TITULO, I checked it out.  Spurred by the discovery by the main character, Alex MacKay, of his grandfather's death a month earlier, Sin Titulo is a maze of realities that weave in and out of one another, dragging readers down myriad rabbit holes with little explanation.  With the updates consisting of single, eight-panel pages, each time, Stewart had to reintroduced and then punctuate each page with a cliffhanger or a revelation or a new mystery.  And he managed that with great facility.

Dark Horse collected the web series into a nice hardcover, which is how I finished reading the story, as I am a poor one to keep up with online comics.  The biggest question I had, with this story that had dream sequences that fed into the memories of another, seemingly random, character, which wove into the story of MacKay's grandfather and an orderly from the retirement home where his grandfather lived out the rest of his life, was whether Stewart could stick the ending.

Rest assured, he did.

And as impressive as Stewart's art is, I was more impressed with his writing in this book.  The pace of the book, teasing out the various narrative threads that appear to have tenuous connections, at best, with one another, was masterful.  He offered the audience just enough to entice them without giving away too much.  And the way he manipulated not just the ideas and the scenes, but the words with which he explained things, was wonderful - a real joy to read and experience.

Sin Titulo is a great book, and if you are a fan of comics, you should definitely check it out.  I don't know how you could be disappointed.

chris

No comments: