Swan Songs #1: What a Wonderful World

Swan Songs #1is a beautiful comic book, but it’s more than just that. It has some excellent plotting, writing, and pacing on display that pairs well with the book’s visual style. W. Maxwell Prince is very well-known at this point for his skill as an award-winning single issue storyteller, HaHa and Ice Cream Man following the same format as Swan Songs.

This opening issue takes place right before the end of the world, the doomsday clock ticking down as our main character Brian spends his last few moments holed up in a hospital with his dying mother. After reading through a gardening magazine outlaid for her, which is something that brings her comfort, he notes that there’s another one out there at a local drug store. Determined to find it for her, he ventures out into a dying world in order to retrieve it for her and face the end of days with a small, happy moment between himself and his mother.

The writing could be painfully forced, heavy handed, and ill-thematic. However, Prince handles everything with grace. The story here focuses on Brian’s journey through a dying world, which is a setting that both he and artist Martin Simmonds do so much with, even though they do very little. It’s a rich setting with some neat world building, both in its conceptual ideas and its visual execution. The emotional beats hit here not because they are forced, but because they naturally arise in the character’s journey.

It makes everything all the more sweeter and engaging. It’s easy to get ripped out of a story when it tries too hard to be something poignant, instead of just telling a story and allowing its importance to flow naturally. Tackling the beauty of endings, and the small moments between people that reign superior over the threat of the end of a world’s totality is something weighty enough to fall flat. Instead, it rises above and stands tall.

As such, the character work here intercedes with the plot to create something that’s very entertaining to read. There’s moments of hilarity, sadness, and tension, all of which are balanced quite well within the book’s tight page count.

Martin Simmonds’ art is simply magical. He’s at the top of his game, as he often is, blending painterly colors with traditional character pencilling to create a blend of visual styles that is both hyper expressive and easy to follow. It brings about a sense of dread and beauty within the coming apocalypse that really hammers home the themes at play here.