Customer Reviews

Solstice

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SOLSTICE is the sort of story you might not like at first glance.

I know I didn't. I read the first two issues at the author's urging, having been a fan of his work for some time, and I didn't get it. The art was scritchy and dirty, the plot all over the place, and the main characters were a completely overbearing father and his absolute simp of a son. It was sweaty, off-putting, and full of pain. And by "it" I mean both the book's paternal relationship and my own relationship to the story.

Yet, something about it stuck with me, and when the comic was finished and published as a single graphic novel, I decided to try it again. I don't know what it was. Distance, perhaps? Time to digest? Whatever it was, it was exactly what I needed.

Yes, I was still looking at something sweaty, off-putting, and full of pain, but that's exactly what SOLSTICE was intended to be. An easy criticism of a story in any form is to say, "I didn't like the characters." I call it easy because it's kind of a cop-out, it doesn't get to the heart of what the problem with the story might be -- or it might be cowardice on the part of the audience, afraid to dig in to a tale that may hide something uncomfortable underneath. The reality is that there is nothing wrong with stories featuring unlikable characters, we just have to be fascinated by the things that are so hateful about them. SOLSTICE is the story of father and son Waterhouse, and the horrible things that make them tick are absolutely fascinating. When I didn't run from the experience, when I put my faith in the creative abilities of writer Steven T. Seagle and artist Justin Norman, trusted them to show me something I may not want to see but that they knew I should see, I became completely involved in what made their messed-up family tick.

A lot of what makes SOLSTICE impossible to put down (a second time) is Seagle's structure. In the interview at the back of the book he calls it "structural" whiplash. The comic is narrated by Waterhouse the Younger, Hugh. He begins at the end, and then he takes us on a serpentine trek through the history that has gotten him where he is. His father, Russell Waterhouse, has a life-threatening illness and is on a relentless quest to find the Fountain of Youth (hey, I just got the clever pun in the family name). We are peeking in on their third and final expedition, and Hugh hips us to how badly the other expeditions went, the erroneous discoveries and the dubious tactics employed by his father. The timeframe and setting changes every couple of pages, never giving the reader time to settle. We are always on the move, the narrative flow mirroring the frenetic pace of the narrator, who just happens to be running for his life.

This complex story is aided and abetted by a more than capable artist, Justin Norman. Up top I called his work "scritchy and dirty," which sounds like an insult, but it's not. The Waterhouses are always in places that are scritchy and dirty (or sweaty, off-putting, and full of pain). Just as Seagle doesn't flinch by letting cracks of niceness show, neither does Norman try to pretty their world up. SOLSTICE is like story as deep immersion therapy -- you're going all the way in.

So, pick up a copy of SOLSTICE and leave your nervous-nelly reading habits in the other room before cracking its cover. You're really in for something if you do. And trust me, just as you never know where you will be from one page to the next -- Chile? Russia? the lost city of Atlantis? -- you're also not going to see the ending coming, and the emotional payoff is immense. You'll finally understand what all that digging was for.

For context, I'll admit that, almost a decade ago, I found the original two issues in a dollar bin and was ready to give up on finding the third issue this year. Don't give up the search, eh? I'll also admit that I take notice of the fact that I started reading it around the autumn equinox and have lately been thinking a lot about immortality.

There is a good chance that this book isn't that good. Maybe you'd have to be a babyboomer reading comics in the early nineties to enjoy it, yearning for those gritty old adventure stories. Maybe you'd have to be a hip newcomer in the early nineties trying to counteract all the malignant machismo of those gritty old adventure stories. The narrative technique may seem affected or effective from page to page, but the story, the ending in particular, is worth your money.