Lost Fantasy #1: Fantasy Hunting

The fantastic isn’t merely confined to people’s imaginations in Lost Fantasy. It exists in another world, connected to Earth. After many long struggles, guardian warriors and those they train have created and enforced a border between the two. Lost Fantasy #1 sets up a story meant to appeal to fans of “fantasies are real” stories.

A young girl runs through the woods, terrified, in Lost Fantasy #1’s opening pages. She comes upon a man who offers to help her only to see him eviscerated by her unseen pursuer. The girl escapes only to get hit by a car and end up in a coma. Whatever it is that attacked the girl, it shouldn’t be on Earth. Enter Henry Blackheart, an FBI consultant who investigates the supernatural and perhaps the only person who can solve this mystery.

Lost Fantasy #1 begins much like other stories that combine the real modern world with myths and fantasies. After a brief in media res setup and a visual introduction to Henry, the issue’s protagonist, the creative team delivers three pages of the alternate history behind this world and one page of background for Henry. It’s a standard fare beginning but not a bad one. Pires gives the narration, especially Henry’s chapter of it, a prose fantasy story sensibility.

Most of Lost Fantasy #1 tracks Henry in an investigation in small-ish town America. Pires is a little heavy handed in the dialogue as he establishes that aside from some fantastical elements, this comic’s world reflects the real world. Henry says he’s saying a prayer, and the sheriff shoots back that he thought it was just “us backwater deplorables” who still believed in God. Shortly thereafter, Pires writes a one-sided conversation for a deputy that, in the course of nine panels, mentions Pizzagate, flyover states, the Trumps, the Bidens, and the Bushes. The scene’s only purpose is to establish an overall resistance to Henry’s investigation, but the repeated name checking proves distracting–even eye roll inducing.

Story and character exploration in Lost Fantasy #1 is somewhat thin. By far the most successful narrative components are the investigative, procedural elements. This issue isn’t really about the fantastical and mythical elements that feature as part of the world. Certainly it’s clear that they will play a larger role in the story going forward. But this first issue is a very approachable detective story that happens to have some fantasy elements.

The driving force behind Lost Fantasy #1 is Casalanguida’s art and Dale’s complementary color scheme. A large part of that owes to Henry’s design. Dressed all in black and standing taller than the characters who he appears with, Henry is hard not to notice. The character demands attention. And on looking closely, his androgynous sensibility and spiky yet disheveled white hair call to mind a character from Final Fantasy or other such Japanese RPG. The massive sword Henry wields further reinforces that idea.

This conspicuously out of place visual style is applied to almost all of the present day fantasy elements. Henry’s features are angled more sharply than the other human characters whose features and bodies are softer and rounder by comparison. Casalanguida applies the same aesthetic to the fantastical creatures that appear late in the issue. They are harder and sharper in design. Dale’s color choices for these creatures does something similar. They appear in heavy contrast to the background and other elements on the page with them.

These visual choices stand in contrast to those made during the four pages of backstory in lost Fantasy #1’s early pages. There Casalanguida kept all visual elements somewhat rounder and softer in appearance. Dale uses a kind of faded, not quite washed out color palette where nothing stands out conspicuously from anything else.

Pires is smart to leave a late issue fight sequence almost entirely dialogue-free. Henry stands against multiple creatures in a fight told through a large number of smaller, irregularly shaped panels. The images are quick cuts within a fast moving melee. Casalanguida keeps the action easy to understand despite the fight jumping from active moment to active moment, usually without much obvious visual transition.

Myers’ lettering choices keep the issue’s few text heavy sequences well organized. This is most notable during the four early pages of backstory. That sequence is effectively one of prose snippets set against more generalized images. Whether it be a box stretching along the full length of a wide panel or a more compact box pushed as far into a corner as possible, Myers keeps the text as out of the way of the art as possible.

A backup story in Lost Fantasy #1 brings back Indigo Children in a new story. This first part is heavily dialogue driven and visually static in many ways. It’s most easily approachable by readers familiar with Indigo Children. Unfortunately it lacks much of a hook for readers without that established interest.