Sunday Splash Page #323

 

"Makin' the Sausage," in Mage and the Endless Unknown, by SJ Miller

Released last year, this follows Mage, who is a young, well, mage, as he traverses the world, on the orders of a cloaked figure with a coyote skull for a head to face the destroyers of the old worlds.

Miller mostly sticks to one image per page, with occasional pages with 2-3 panels if he wants a slightly quicker reaction shot. There's not much dialogue either, just a couple of expository word balloons.

So it's mostly down to the art, and Miller tends towards a deceptively simple art style. It reminds me of a children's book. Maybe the one about the kid with the purple crayon, except Miller adds a lot of body horror to this story. I'd think the art style to "cute" to really work for that purpose, but Miller pulls it off. The mostly-silent pages, and the focus on Mage's expressions as it encounters these things, helps to sell it. 

It's not a peaceful world Mage stepped into, and he gets increasingly worn down and hurt as the story progresses. He's swallowed by some immense shadow thing, and its innards bite and corrupt his arm. So he blasts it off with the magic wand and grows an arm of vines in its stead. He meets either an anthropologist or a biologist - who Miller dubs "Fortune" - and they find more trouble. It's sad to see Mage go from cheerfully helping flowers bloom and greeting those he meets with smiles, to later keeping his guard up and trying to warn people away from his friend. The world has taken its toll in tangible and intangible ways.

It isn't all misery, thankfully. The infected arm becomes its own being (called "Double"), who helps Mage escape the shadow creature's insides. Fortune helps him repair his wand, and takes care of him after an especially brutal encounter that leaves him with a mangled leg and down an arm. Again. It's not clear how much good Mage actually accomplished, as Miller makes it clear this process has been going for a long time, and may go for a long time yet. But we at least see how his actions have made things better for those that follow, and maybe a community effort will speed things along.