Every 22 years, a comet called “Heaven Star” passes over an alien world, but one year ago, its flight path was a little bit different—it flew right into said alien world, destroying all civilization there, and plunging it into Mad Max-style decline.
And that’s how Seattle-based cartoonist Kazimir Strzepek begins The Mourning Star (Bodega), an epic fantasy drama he was originally self-publishing as a series of minicomics, but which is now available in a nicely designed, square-bound graphic novel, apparently the first of several volumes.
The characters that populate the world of Mourning Star don’t look quite human, but seem close enough. Strzepek has said some of the designs began as sketches of Nosferatu, and most of the characters seem to have the bald, pointy-toothed silent-film vampire somewhere in their DNA, as they resemble elves or goblins (with a few bird- and dog-faced people thrown in for good measure).
The artist’s design style, and his mixture of sudden bouts of action and violence, recalls the work of Scott Pilgrim’s Bryan Lee O’Malley. The cartoony art featuring nonhuman characters in service of a pretty straightforward fantasy story recalls French masters Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim’s Dungeon books. That’s some pretty good company to be in.
With this first volume, Strzepek is mainly interested in world-building, setting the stage—the world is destroyed in just six pages—and introducing us to a large cast who have yet to begin interacting with one another much. Our main characters seem to be young Klavir, a young man/goblin-looking guy who is journeying with older friend Wilm and a little video game ghost-looking thing called a dream eater. Klavir is searching to find his lost love, who went missing shortly after the world ended.
There’s also a mysterious, amnesiac and kinda goofy loner who is something called a “Snipper Sniper,” although he’s forgotten that’s what he is. He still carries around two huge pairs of scissors, though, and seems to be pretty unstoppable when it comes to fighting with them.
And finally there’s a group of legendary warriors in service to some bad guys apparently called The Rule, who act like the bandits in samurai movies.
In broad strokes, these character types seem tiresomely familiar, but what distinguishes Strzepek’s work from mere genre exercise is the way he focuses on the day-to-day, struggling-to-survive aspect of the world he’s made as much as the characters being on any sort of adventure.
Sure, there are sword fights and giant-centipede attacks, but just as much panel real estate is devoted to showing his protagonists setting up camp (and all the neat little camping gadgets he made up for that), looking for food or, in one case, going to the bathroom. You don’t see that in your typical end-of-the-world fantasy.
But then, Strzepek’s winning Mourning Star is anything but typical; it’s a quietly transcendent cartoon adventure story of the sort we see way too few of these days.