Do you want a comic that will expand your mind? Do you want a comic that uses the medium to its highest potential? Do you want a comic that you can crawl inside and get lost in?
Yes? Then you want “Change” #1.
Written by Ales Kot
Illustrated by Morgan JeskeA foul-mouthed struggling screenwriter who moonlights as a car thief. An obscenely wealthy rapper completely disconnected from the real world. A dying cosmonaut on his way back to Earth. Los Angeles is being toyed with by destructive forces that repeatedly find the city through time and swallow it whole, and those three are the only people able to save it – if they survive the fanatics who live in the hills, National Security Agency agents, and the horrors that lurk in the Pacific Ocean.
“Change” opens on a beautiful and terrible imagination of what fictional screenwriter Sonia Bjornquist’s script for fictional rapper W-2’s “H.P. Lovecraft” homage film would look like. I dare not spoil much more than that. If that sounds good to you, then you’re going to be hooked from the very first page. It’s dark, twisted, and provocative. Kot frames it as the work of a stubborn creative person who will not compromise, in such an authentic way that one wonders if there isn’t a lot of himself in this character. You get a sense that she feels her work is far more important and well-crafted than anyone else thinks it is. The scene seems deliberately written to be overbearing and inaccessible to a general audience, which is of course the very thing that sparks distaste toward it from the other principle characters of the story. From here, Kot splinters these characters off into their own spheres of influence, highlighting the self-centeredness and soul-sucking doom that has thematically characterized Los Angeles in so many modern stories. “Change” is virtually free from any preaching or heavy-handedness. These are characters who have been warped and disillusioned by their struggles, but the story has not been.
The story is one of apocalyptic science fiction proportions. As the solicitation promises, a major threat is heading for Los Angeles. It is yet unclear how these characters factor in or why they have the ability to change things. Leave that to future issues. Issue #1 is too busy bombarding us with beautifully disorienting storytelling and stellar visual sequences that inform us about the threat and about the characters, but without combining the two at all. It is a little too avant garde for its own good, but Kot won’t compromise. The book is better for that fact.
Ales Kot is clearly a writer who trusts his audience to go on a journey with him, denying storytelling conventions along the way, with the promise that your trust will be rewarded. Kot drops us in on these characters who are in the middle of projects or missions in various states of turmoil. He lets us in on the exploits of these characters, rather than making them perform for us. He doesn’t write exposition. He lets the reader connect most of the dots by trusting the art team and using just enough of a script to let us in. He embraces the fact that he is writing for a comic book. That sounds obvious and simplistic, but a lot of writers seem to forget the potential of sequential art in telling a story. The writers that embrace it are the types of creators that make breakthroughs in the genre. They write the books that challenge and reward the reader. “Change” #1 is a terrific example of all of this and of a writer who feels like he is on the cusp of writing the next important comic book.
Morgan Jeske’s artwork mostly stands up nicely to the task of trying to follow Kot’s spiraling story. That aforementioned opening scene makes about as good a first impression as one can, tastefully depicting something beautiful and turning it into something dark and miserable. It’s different from what follows in the real story pages and it’s the best work in the issue. The rest of the story is drawn in a loose somewhat exaggerated version of what guys like Paul Pope do. It’s dynamic and very intentionally unseemly at times. There are vile images that match the cynicism of the writing quite nicely. There are other panels, that attempt this, but come off as merely odd. Some varied choices are made with regard to perspective and some present the evocation to the reader better than others. However, Jeske is at his best when asked to speed up the action of a scene. He creates a tapestry of smaller panels in rapid succession that each contain their own evocative image or iconography, delivering one of the issue’s few “action” scenes that can be poured over while highlighting the suddenness of the event. He also uses similar small, seemingly transitional panels to break up scenes and give them subtext, such as an extreme close-up of a fly near the end of the issue that acts as an omen moving forward. His avant garde choices match the aim of the writing in coaxing the reader into reading further into the book than what is on the page.
“Change” is a book that has a lot to offer the reader that will give it time and attention. You won’t get anything out of this issue if you plan to lazily read through it and treat it like entertainment – though it is very entertaining. How important or memorable the miniseries is going to be remains to be seen, but it has high ideals beyond being the death of a major American city. Kot himself has said that it is about the “Death of Imagination.” The purely artistic and uncompromising choices made with “Change” #1 make that idea one worth exploring.
Final Verdict: 8.6 – Buy. Too artsy for some, to be sure, but holy cow it’s good.
