ECHOLANDS #1: Of The Red

There are a large amount of amazingly good comics out almost every week from a plethora of publishers. There hasn’t been a week gone by in recent memory that I haven’t read something that wasn’t cleverly written or beautifully illustrated or some combination of both. However every now and then a comic will come along that is so deeply imbued with the passion of the creative team, that each and every page sweeps you away and you find yourself reading it again and again, finding new magic and detail every single time you do. Echolands #1 is one of those comics…an absolutely riveting dark fantasy that sweeps you away from the first to the last page.

J.H Williams III and W Haden Blackman open with an alpha and omega single page splash introducing us to the central protagonist Hope showing us her origins to final confrontation moment against an unknown enemy… but then back it up and drop you into what has to be one of the most beautiful and audaciously paneled scenes using a red hooded cape ever to grace the pages of a comic since Macfarlane’s early Spawn days as we get sucked along with Hope of the Red as she runs through the streets of the ever-changing city of San Francisco…wait what? Yes, San Francisco but a strange twisted mishmash version where fantasy, mythical, and science fiction blend together to create a landscape that is at once partially recognizable yet totally unique. Hope is a thief and she’s stolen something very valuable from a wizard…

The journey unfolds from there as we meet some of Red’s companions and fellow thieves as they fend off the wizard’s coppers to get away with Hope’s stolen prize. Hope is of the Red…a gloriously clever twist on the idea of red riding hood but that doesn’t mean Hope is some good little girl who’s off to visit grandma and maybe save her from a wolf…no it means that Hope is imbued with a dark violent magic that comes to the fore when she is cornered and in danger as a Wizard’s copper discovers in a violent encounter as Hope and her companion Cor find themselves cornered and the magic manifests itself in a gory but superbly rendered explosive moment. The narrative is tightly focused and fairly straightforward as we meet Hope, learn she’s stolen a thing of value, meet the very strange and intriguing being who has been sent to retrieve the stolen item and the story ends with Hope and her companions facing off against the wizard’s hunter sent to retrieve the stolen gem as we learn that Hope is not the only being imbued with magic. The glory of this straightforward plotline is in the details built around it though. With several mysteries teased from what The Red is, that Hope has,  to the upward red arrow symbol to who the strange wizard as Williams III and Blackman dangle more than enough interesting threads to wrap you up in the narrative track they lay down.

Comic books in the landscape format are nothing new, but I cannot think of a single other book in this format that squeezes the potential out of EVERY SINGLE page through gorgeously broken up and flowing panel work which combines in perfect symbiosis with the art in each panel. The switches in white to black bordering to complement the thematics of what’s on page are sublime and then Williams levels up even further and turns the paneling into the detailed side of a building so it seems like you peering into Hope and the rest of the thieves hideout. The art is beyond sumptuously detailed. Every single panel and image is exquisitely rendered by Williams III and colored by Dave Stewart who turns color into a living creature here with the red of Hopes hooded cape or the inky blacks and darker colors of the Wizards magical hunter. Williams III uses an absolute smorgasbord of rendering styles when drawing background characters which add to the idea of this world being a mish mash where living beings can be completely black and white or drawn in multiple ways to show their uniqueness. Letterer Todd Klein is very aware of the power of the images he’s playing with and the lettering is meticulously sparse and spread out letting the images do nearly all the heavy lifting.

I’ve read this issue six or seven times I’ll probably read it another 6 or seven more and find new stuff to marvel at every time.

Adding a prose piece to comics seems to have become the thing to do these days as creative teams take the opportunity to flesh out the worlds they want you to believe in with a piece of writing that fills out details for the reader that aren’t necessarily things that need to be drawn…and Williams and Blackman do that here with a “magazine” style interview (with pics and all) which introduces us to the wizard in question that Hope’s stolen the gem from, a Teros Dermond of the Order. We meet the drifting oracle who gives us cryptic clues to what’s coming up in future issues and some Echolands business adverts with a cartoon which again seems to me to emphasize how “magic” and “Science” in this world may be more closely mixed together than we’ve been shown at this point.