Although they’ve been playing a lot of their mysteries super close to the chest, Curt Pires and David Rubín use the third issue of “The Fiction” to fill us in on what happened to Tsang all those years ago. Balancing elements of Stephen King-esque horror, postmodern theory, and unbridled imagination, Pires and Rubín let loose and deliver one odd but engaging comic.
Written by Curt Pires
Illustrated by David Rubín & Michael Garland
Kassie, Max, and Tyler are held captive by the Corruption in the Fiction.
I think the easiest shorthand to describe “The Fiction” is as “The Unwritten” by way of Stephen King. The book is filled with all the book-diving, genre-bending pomo madness of the Mike Carey and Peter Gross series, but it also features a lot of the buried memories and childhood trauma tropes in a King novel. That’s, like, a super general way to describe this book, because Pires also mixes in these treatises on surrealism, reality and fiction, and storytelling in general. He’s doing this old school postmodern novel thing over here, where the characters might be purposefully flattened and the ideas pretty much drive the entire narrative. So even if the story feels like it’s flirting with these conventional tropes, I think they’re used to further explore the story’s main themes, stated loudest in this issue.
If the first two issues were more exploratory and intrigue-inducing, Pires goes for full-on horror here, which Rubín is all too happy to deliver. There’re a lot of figures with giant, gnawing teeth. There’re extreme close-ups of terrified faces. There’s a push in the plot to get the characters out from one set piece and over to the next one. The big revelation here is that Tsang, the old friend they all dived into this dimensional transport book for, is a minion of this chaotic evil, and the issue primarily deals with the fallout from this information. It feels like Pires is keeping a lot of the story close to the chest, and I think so much of the terror he’s able to conjure comes from us not knowing what’s going on.
You also get the feeling that so much of the crazy stuff we’re seeing in this alternate world Kassie, Tyler, and Max get sucked into exists because Pires wants to give David Rubín some spectacular stuff to draw. And Rubín continually proves himself more than up to the challenge. His inspired and expressive art, enhanced even further by Michael Garland’s scarlet- and emerald-based color palette, makes this a moody and bizarre experience, and especially helps keep up the interest in some more exposition heavy scenes. I’m thinking of the school flashback where Kassie delivers a diatribe on Surrealism and Lewis Carroll, which I feel didn’t land as strongly as so many of Pires’s other scenes.
There’s a reason Paul Pope picked Rubin to contribute to the “Battling Boy” universe, and each page Rubín delivers only further proves his fantastic talent. That line control! Those passive and objective shots! Those emotive close-ups! Those cool manga-like transformation sequences! They’re almost more impressive and assured than the full spread action shots. It’s an immersive and lively style that makes the book feel more unique and separated from its counterparts.
By the nature of the miniseries format, there’s a compressed pacing to the story, but Pires and Rubín juggle all these elements without making one part feel overwhelming. A couple of the characters seem to be swept aside in favor of others, existing to fill out the frame, but that doesn’t take away too badly from the rest of the narrative. Pires leaves us with a lot of questions still at the end of the issue, and I doubt the final part will bother to answer them all, which I think is cool. If anything else, “The Fiction” #3 proves you can have a conventional story that lands well when the storytellers themselves are so on point about it.
Final Verdict: 7.5 – Interesting ideas help carry a loose premise, but all of it works so well because of some constantly fantastic art.
