Kaya #7: Welcome to the Jungle

Kaya #7 kicks-off to a new arc that, for a few reasons, isn’t the best for new readers. There’s been a recent trend among ongoing indies to declare the beginning of every new arc a great place for new readers to jump on, and most times that just isn’t true. However, that is almost always paired with the release of a collected volume that makes the jump to #7 very, very easy. Kaya is in this boat. Even though this issue contains some of the series’ best work, it isn’t worth checking out without grabbing the series’ first collected edition as well. This chapter is not the start to a new story, but instead the second half of the last arc. With all that out of the way, we can now talk about the issue itself, which is pretty stellar.

We open in the past, the last days of Kaya and Jin’s kingdom crumbling to bits as the Atrian Empire deploys their attack. It’s in these haunting pages, as the ghostly sensation of Kaya’s mission is put on full display, that the reader is given a deeper look into the sufferage that the two have been running from. While the world of Kaya is deeply fantastical, colorful, and full of strange life, there’s a sinister edge underneath that we’ve only been told about in previous issues that is now told to us visually through a beautiful use of both penciled emotion by Craig and the evocative, one-tone coloring that Wordie provides. From there, we catch back-up with Kaya and the Lizard-riders as they narrowly escape Goro Bay, Jin having been abducted and chained to ankles of monsters with the duty of delivering him to the same being who destroyed his kingdom.

Now, this issue starts off on a magnificent foot. Our heroes are down on their last leg, Kaya having failed her duties as Jin’s escort. Craig pulls a lot of character-defining work from not just Kaya, but Muska and their fellow lizard-riders as well in the wake of this event. Craig’s visual storytelling in this section is beyond what many other books are capable of right now. The hair-raising escape from Goro Bay doesn’t have a single ounce of unnecessary dialogue, and each panel says a thousand words. It’s impossible to just gloss over the pretty pictures here, because each one demands your attention. The visual art, and the marriage of that with text is the essential ingredient to any good comic, but a truly great comic could still be understood and read without a single speech bubble or text box. The series in general, but this issue specifically, passes that specification with flying colors.

While the last arc struggled a bit with balancing our main characters developmental depth and the introduction of the world, its functions, and lore. The kinks in that process have seemingly been rectified in this issue. We’re introduced to the Poison Lands, a dark, twisted jungle full of ancient monuments and near-Lovecraftian creatures. Jin’s death march through it acts as the issues B-plot, and spends its time fleshing out his character to be more than just the bratty royal kid. There’s some really subtle, poignant, and quick characterization done on a monstrous amphibian that says a million things without having any spoken depth. The plotting of the flashback, the Goro Bay escape, and the Jin’s march all flow well with each other, the issue not wasting anytime as it prioritizes its visual storytelling over anything else.

This issue’s cliffhanger is very exciting, interesting, and a genuine surprise that bodes very well for the next issue.