Pages

Mar 1, 2017

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 735: The Spiral Path #1, July 1986

https://www.comics.org/issue/300773/

As I noted a few weeks ago, I picked up a box of indie comics on the cheap, and found some real treasures (both of the excellent and execrable kind) contained within. Having made my way through some of that box, I found a few series that I thought were worth pursuing, so I returned to the scene of my previous purchase and made another, this time with some method to the madness. I was fortunate to come across in these quarter bins a few complete runs of old school comics (Jon Sable#1-20, Aztec Ace #1-12), and a couple of complete series. Today's comic (and tomorrow's) are examples of these.

The Spiral Path is a cool little fantasy comic, reprinted from the seminal British comics weekly Warrior, and written by Steve Parkhouse, the man responsible for many of my favourite old school Doctor Who comics. It's cool because it is meshing, somewhat seamlessly, the aesthetic of ancient Britons and ancient North Americans - it works nicely, given the correspondences between Druidic belief and Native American belief. I'm a little concerned that this might qualify as appropriation of a culture that still believes in many of its ancient ways, though the other side of that is that many ancient practices are used as settings of fiction. I suppose the difference is that not all of them have been the target of such a protracted attempt at erasure as Native American belief has. On the plus side, then, this comic is celebratory of such beliefs, casting them as a defense against the power of death.

Is it odd that I'm feeling the urge to put a positive spin on everything I see and hear these days?

To be continued.

No comments: