Never Iron Anything!: ‘The Light’ from Off-Kilter Comics.

‘The Light’.

Written by Michael Robertson.

Art by Martina Rossi.

Letters by Mike Stock.

Editing by Terri King.

Published by Off-Kilter Comics.

28 pages - Full Colour.

Digital Copy - £0.99 / Physical Copy - £4.00.

The Story - ‘To get to the light, Abigail must run a gauntlet fraught with danger. One wrong move and she will surely die. Although, that’s not what scares her the most...

Not only does she have to reach the light, but she has to ensure her eight-year-old son gets there too. A life she cherishes more than her own, can she keep him safe as they try to evade a giant cyclops and his deadly club, bugs with electric stingers capable of stopping a human heart, and hell pigs with jaws strong enough to snap bone?

And if she does, can she then do the one thing she thought would be easy as a parent? Can she tell her boy the truth?’

The Review - From page one of this comic you are blown away with the level of artistic detail on show. This falls heavily into the fantasy/fairy tale genre but like all good examples of that particular storytelling area has the required jeopardy and tension.

I’ve known the writer Michael Robertson for a few years now from tabling at the same conventions. He plies his trade in both the comics and prose fiction areas and approaches both with a thoughtful style and well planned structure. This is a one-and-done story and suits that delivery method.

The art has a lovely line with use of washed out colours that border on the whisps of a watercolour. The characters show great facial and physical acting and the monster designs are something else altogether - Christ on a bike those ‘Hell Pigs’ will give you nightmares!

The story is almost set against two halves. The first I will share and the second I will only describe in comparison to it’s equal partner. We initially enter a fairy tale setting that is both visually and verbally something akin to a post Sandman era Midsummer Night’s Dream. The dialogue and narration is not normal speech and leans in heavily to poetry and romantic soliloquy. There is an alliterative style in much of the mother’s speech that is great to read.

‘Beasts belched from Beelzebub’s bowels, their bark has nothing on their bite.’

The story is also about parenthood and shows how far a mother will go for her child. They battle aggressive and deadly supernatural beasts intent on their demise and scrabble over the nightmare terrain of their world. Then, suddenly, what you thought was happening changes but does so subtlety. You begin to see the actual reality of this fantastical, and possibly make believe, world. What is really happening? We reach something, a change, a realisation, and the story moves over the road from magical analogy to political allegory. In my opinion this becomes an important story for our times that deals with immigration and the plight of the refugee and especially the ability to care or be cruel.

The lost people in that/our world need help. This is quite something.

The only thing that let down the story a little for me was the lettering. It seemed stylised to represent the almost verse like language but was a little small and sat in balloons too large. This is however a small problem in what is otherwise a really interesting book.

Highly recommended.