The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 758: Fort - Prophet of the Unexplained #4, September 2002

And so things wrap up for Charles and Yhir. Actually, they wrap up pretty darned quickly, like within the first 5 or 6 pages. The feeling I get is that the Fort series really is more properly a graphic novel, or rather a complete work rather than a periodical publication. Or it should have been. Much of this final issue is aftermath and epilogue, though there is, in true horror movie fashion, a return of the baddie in the final pages. What we see, though, and this is significant for those who know of Fort's work, is his rededication to his work of chronicling "the Damned," the occurrences and people that simply cannot be explained by science.

This was a good series. I almost see it as a prequel to Irving and Rennie's Necronauts (did I already say that? Having deja vu). The young Mr. Lovecraft, Fort's child sidekick so to speak, begins writing after the confrontation with the alien virus, and I could see him growing up to become the same character that takes part in the Necronauts' adventure.

I think that was my first series for this year. What next?

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 757: Fort - Prophet of the Unexplained #3, August 2002

Charles Fort is a study in contradictions in this issue. Though he makes his way around New York on a horse-drawn bookmobile, he also manages to go full-on action hero in this issue, actually engaging in a controlled slide down the Statue of Liberty, then chasing a giant alien virus into a sewer with a flashlight taped to a rifle. It's a wonderful reconception (I'm assuming this. Perhaps the real Fort actually was an adventurer) of a historical character. I'm going to be talking with my class about this next week, the notion of taking real people or places and fitting them into a fiction. My argument at the end of class today was that history is more often made up of events than of people. Even when we do recognize people as historically significant, it's because they are somehow attached to an event of historical significance. What the kind of fictionalization that Fort traffics in does is remind us that the people involved in those historical events, be they the fundamental figures or simply faces in the crowd, are, or were, each individuals with their own personalities, ideas, and dreams. As I teach Natalie Asplund's Redcoat West, and then teach factual accounts of the Northwest Mounted Police, I ask my students to notice what fiction is doing for us. It humanizes the historical. Biography and autobiography can also serve the same purpose, as long as we recognize that these, too, are forms of fiction. There's no such thing as an objective record of human experience, as far as I can tell.

Of course, some fictionalizations are more...real...than others. The one in Fort leaps over the cliff of the real and into complete fantasy, but it still reminds us that the real Charles Fort, the one who compiled the wonderful books that serve as his legacy, was a human being, perhaps even an adventurous one. And wouldn't it be just lovely if he actually did save New York from an alien virus from the back of a horse-drawn bookmobile?

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 756: Fort - Prophet of the Unexplained #2, July 2002

Fort and Yhir, his alien comrade, track an exo-virus through the nighttime streets of New York. I like to live my life believing that this sort of thing was happening all the time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There's just something about that early Industrial Revolution setting that lends itself to the strange and weird crawling from their hiding places in the fog and smoke-shrouded streets. And if this is how Fort collected his data for his strange books, so much the better.

It's interesting to see Frazer Irving's artwork on this piece and to compare it to something like Annihilator, which I read a few weeks back. His style is quite different without the digital colouring and someone else inking him. He's also playing with shadow a lot more, or it's a lot more noticeable here, though that makes sense in the context of the story. I enjoy this kind of versatility in an artist, every bit as much as I appreciate it in a writer. There's something to be said for consistency in art style, knowing what it is you're going to be seeing when you buy a work by a particular artist, but there's also something to be said for being surprised, pleasantly so, each time. Thus far, Irving's work has had that affect on me.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 755: Fort - Prophet of the Unexplained #1, June 2002

You have to love Charles Fort. I'll admit that I enjoy delving into the irrational side of the world every now and again, but this guy made a life out of it. His catalogues of the weird read somewhere between scholarly treatise and science fiction. His dedication to chronicling the things we can't understand is inspiring. It obviously was for Mr. Lenkov and Mr. Irving.

This comic reads like a Lovecraft story. Really, that's one of the primary reasons I bought it in the first place. Irving was the artist on Necronauts, another comic that uses historical figures associated with the weird as main characters. I like to think that Fort exists in a similar, if not the same, universe. Though his little sidekick H.P. might mess with that theory.

Today's issue is very much set up, as the openings of all good limited series ought to be. Businessmen are going missing, strange lights have been seen in the sky, and librarian Charles Fort thinks there's a connection. Actually, let's call him an "action librarian." Which, really, is kind of amazing. How does one go about getting that job?

To be continued.