Cloven is a book of genetically engineered satyrs set loose on the world. And it begins with a lie: the first two pages tell the sad story of the conception and birth of Tuck, a goat-boy. None of it is true. But it’s a confusion that sets up the story nicely. This is the first book of three, and Garth Stein spins a story of myth out of science, and sets up a promethean war as nicely as Mary Shelley could have.
Written by Garth Stein
Art by Matthew SouthworthThe Cloven Book One stars James Tucker, the most successful genetically modified human organism ever created. Conceived in a privately financed, top-secret laboratory on Washington state’s Vashon Island, Tucker is a cross between a human and a goat — a Cloven. Known to his friends as “Tuck,” all he wants is to live a normal life as a university student; everything is going fine, until he shows a girl his hooves… Moody and mysterious and atmospheric as a fever dream, The Cloven Book One follows Tuck’s breakneck journey across the Pacific Northwest as he searches for a place to belong. Book One of a dynamic, atmospheric, and wryly funny graphic novel trilogy by two bestselling and critically acclaimed storytellers.
(Side note: That blurb above is a lie. Of the phrase, “all he wants is to live a normal life as a university student; everything is going fine, until he shows a girl his hoofs:” none of that happens. We don’t know what he wants to live like, the last bit of school we see is high school, there is a girl in one scene but she doesn’t see his hoofs, and nothing is going fine for him.)
Every Frankensteinian story needs a mad scientist, but we get an avuncular scientist instead, Lagner. Instead of insisting on absolute control over his creation, Langler is happy to set them free in the world, like an invasive species, and force the world to adapt. “What if the key to science isn’t science at all?” he says early, when trying to bring his children to life. He operates with kindly instincts of a father, and keeps his children alive with love, almost literally hugging them to life.
The Clovens have created a whole set of rituals and mysticism out of whole cloth. The better rituals are the ones that are tightly connected to what makes them unique, like romping through the woods and city. Some are just old hokum, like the repeated baptism of rubbing blood on people’s foreheads.
One of my favorite aspect of Cloven is how the naturally the mythology flows from these simple starting points. I sometimes imagine that all myths originate from a distant source of ancient humans talking about actual events, with a slight exaggeration each time the story is retold. Cloven reads exactly like that distant source. In Cloven, the romping and jumping soon becomes a local cryptozoological myth in Seattle, like Sasquatch. I can imagine a thousand years from now it’s turned into a myth of fey demons joining our world.
A lot of the credit for how fun this book is goes to artist Matthew Southworth. He’s comfortable with bold panels and two page spreads, The work is immediately identifiable to any fan of his previous work, Stumptown. Each page uses just two or three simple colors, with a few notable exceptions: a nursery, a rumbling, and a fight.
I do think comic could have used a proper letterer, someone who could have spent more time distinguishing between the thoughts of different characters, instead of everyone using the same “blue box” to think in.
Southworth’s sounds effects are something special for comics. He doesn’t use normal onomatopoeia to tell the reader what we would be hearing, instead we read Tuck’s interpretations of what he’s hearing. When Tuck hears a herd of Cloven running, the sound effect is literally the words, “rumbling foot falls like many thunder hooves.”
Cloven is a simple non-linear structure, interleaving two timelines from Tuck’s life, and I’m not sure it benefits the book. The first timeline is from Tuck’s birth to when his adopted mother gives him up, and the second timeline is from his imprisonment and escape to finding a tribe again. Tuck finds a herd of his people twice, and goes romping with each group for the first time, and in our non-linear plot those events happen almost one right after the other, like the book forcing deja-vu on us.
Continued belowThe satyr imagery is up front and strong in Cloven, and it’s easy to read a hundred things into these demon-looking half-beasts and the hippie community they create. But for me, a middle-aged geek, it reminds me of the philosophy of Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson was a counter-culture author who wrote of the differences between the goats who lively freely and the sheep who follow meekly. In his books, humans can, and do, choose the goat morality of anarchism and independence.
Cloven has one brief few pages in high school, in one panel a coach says, “there is no I in team.” Tuck responds quietly, “no but there is a me.” The scientists have created their own übermensch, superior to us in strength and endurance, who are building their own rituals and culture outside of ours.
My favorite science fiction stories are about what it means to be human, and what happens when the next stages of evolution come rolling in. This theme isn’t alien to comics, for example, the entirety of the X-Men universe, but Stein is tackling this with a bit more care into world building and a bit more mythical imagery than I normally see in these stories. There are two more books of Cloven, of this myth and invasion, and it’s beautiful to watch unfold.
