Joshua Malbin

Here’s how I imagine what Matt Kindt (author of 3 Story, among other books) did in writing Revolver. At least, when I’ve ended up with results similar, this is how I’ve gotten there.

He had a great concept. A series of terrorist attacks shakes America, with conventional, biological, and radiological bombs exploding in multiple cities at nearly the same time. Fleeing the newspaper offices where he works, Sam ends up in a car with Jan, his boss. He kills a man, the world is in flames.

And then he wakes up to his ordinary life with his girlfriend Maria, who wants to go shopping for a new table set. Jan treats him just as contemptuously as ever. He can’t figure out what’s happened to him until the clock hits 11:11 and he finds himself back in Armageddon.

So there’s the concept: every day, the main character switches back and forth from world to world, on the run with Jan in one, at home with Maria in the other. He begins to prefer the crisis world to the ordinary one, because there he feels like he’s doing something important every day.

I had a few geek-level sci-fi issues with this setup. Like, it established that his body isn’t the same between the two worlds. Injuries sustained in one don’t carry over to the other. So what happens to him in one world while he’s conscious in the other? Does he go limp? No one around comments on it if he does. Does his body keep performing tasks without his being aware of it? He never remarks on things being different from the way he left them so that too seems unlikely, and anyway it would raise more unanswered questions about the consciousness in charge when “he” is absent. Or does he somehow experience simultaneous events in alternating fashion?

Whatever. It’s basically a solid conceit.

Then Kindt had to find a plot to fill out the concept, give it the shape of a story. So he kept writing until he found one that fit well enough, retconned the beginning, and wrapped up the end. At least, as I say, that’s how I imagine it happened, because that’s how I’ve done it myself.

You end up with an antagonist introduced only midway through the book and an explanation for what’s going on that doesn’t fully track. (For example [SPOILER ALERT], the villain confesses to Sam that he’s caused all the chaos in the one world by exploiting knowledge gleaned in the other. That doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t the hard part of building a biological or radiological bomb no matter where you got the blueprint? And how is it easier to gain access to deadly secrets in one world rather than the other before the bombs go off?)

Oh well. A solid premise an an 80% satisfying resolution still puts Matt Kindt ahead of nine of ten other comic book authors out there, and makes the book worth buying.

Preview below the fold.

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Matt Kindt’s 3 Story tells three tales of a giant: the accounts of his mother, wife, and daughter. In childhood Craig Pressgang is normal-sized, but he keeps growing and growing until by his middle adulthood he’s three stories tall.

The mother’s story, the first one in the book, put me off a bit. I didn’t like the enforced simplicity, short sentences and sentence fragments broken across panels or by ellipses within panels. It struck me as an attempt to heighten the drama artificially. Also, the mother’s story was the most purely retrospective, and not, seemingly, very important to the whole.

With the wife’s story, though, the book started to grow on me (so to speak). There’s a lot more dialogue, which breaks up the repetitive short phrases, and a greater attention to the increasing problems of being huge, not just practical matters like how to get clothes or where to take a dump, but Craig’s progressively worsening disconnection from the world below him. This is presented not merely as an emotional detachment but also a physical one, as his nerves grow too long to carry sensation to his brain quickly. Eventually he can barely hear his loved ones even when they shout. He accidentally steps on a person and decides he needs to go away before he hurts his family.

In the third story the giant’s daughter, grown up now, tracks where he went after he left them. Here the narrative returns to the style I didn’t care for before, and again I’m not sure what is added to what we saw from the wife.

3 Story, then, is one pretty good story sandwiched between two lesser ones. The one in the middle takes up most of the book, so that’s okay.

The art matches the naive voice well, although I didn’t particularly love it  in its own right. There’s very little depth to any of the drawings, and the backgrounds are often washes of a single color.

Preview below the fold.

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