True Stories #2
March 2005 £2
56 pages A5 B&W with colour cover
Island
Gemma's holidays on her father's remote island are overshadowed by a sinister storm gathering in the distance.
Isle
art by Chris Askham
A sailor awakens to find himself held captive on a mysterious isle.
A grand folly, this, from Tony McGee, which throws all the shapes of a metaphysical examination of a couple of anguished lives, but just lacks sufficient exposition or dialogue or inherent analysis to achieve the kind of complexity that makes a story this brooding really involving.
The teenaged Gemma holidays on the remote island of her father – a broken man, detached and struggling for emotional sustenance. Conversation is brief, silences protracted; there is something not right with this relationship. Gemma retreats into fantasy, her father into reliable depression, but there is no escape: a sinister fog gathers on the horizon; it's moving their way.
Ambitious and downbeat, the narrative of Island lacks impetus due to the relative absence of a physical conflict, but with a beautifully conceived grimness, hypnotic rhythm, unearthly atmosphere and striking visual clarity, there is much to admire about this tentative, under-explored meditation on guilt.
Flip-side strip Isle is flimsy and conventional in comparison to its elusive neighbour, but boasts a polished story-telling which is technically faultless. Here, McGee's Sisyphus-like tale is superbly realised by the fine-tuned artistry of Chris Askham, to diverting, enjoyable-enough consequence.
Island is a story I came up with midway through working on Frontiers. It incorporated characters from an earlier abandoned story Three Wishes and also elements from Isle, a similar but completely unrelated tale that came to me around the same time (hence the titles). A while back Chris Askham of Sin and Sponge fame asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a story. So I dashed off the script to fantasy shipwreck story Isle and sent it to him. I think it's one of Chris' best art jobs to date.
