A 32 page comic, this is the "Complete Cypher Trilogy" — the different stories originally appeared in Heavy Metal comics. In black and white, the style of the art is unusual. It looks like it is done by covering a white background with a film of black (maybe wax) and then using a thin knife to scrape away the black. Maybe it is a form of woodcut. It gives a very different effect from using a black pen on a white background (although the speech bubbles are clearly done in pen, in the traditional way). The style goes well with the stories.

The setting for Cypher starts in a dystopian anonymous future America — very gothic. The hero is a bewildered fat young man with an "Eraserhead" haircut. Everyone else is more stylish or weirder than him, and they seem know about secret that he doesn’t understand.. He is interested in philosophy and art. The first page of the book has a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean Paul Sartre makes an uncredited guest appearance in the first story. The story moves onto a fantasy or dream which leads him on a road trip though an abstract landscape to the World’s Largest Sculpture Gardens. It features some huge granite sculptures which look very impressive in this style of art.

Some of the images are clichéd — for example, a circus ringmaster (Salvador Dali?) and a threatening nurse in the dream sequence. The story is fragmented and enigmatic. Nevertheless, this is an interesting comic, and it would be interesting to read more of Cypher.

Categories: Fiction