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| Review by Lily Fierro |
In the coming week, as audiences in America recover from Valentine’s Day and respond to the first R rated superhero film from the Marvel stable, Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank’s first volume of Mezolith will finally grace American shelves nearly six years after its original release in the U.K.
Filled with outstanding artwork and fascinating mythologies, Mezolith Book One: Stone Age Dreams and Nightmares follows the traditions of folktales from around the world along with nordic and Greek mythology with its story of Stone Age Britain.
Consequently, Mezolith may feel out of date in our postmodern, reference heavy world of fiction, but its incorporation of anthropomorphism along with the powers of nature gaze at the earth with both reverence and fear, evoking a sense of naturalism that we’ve nearly lost in this technology age.
With comics focusing heavily on superheros or day-in-the-life premises, Mezolith seems simplistic in its characters, but in this minimalism, it reminds us of the foundations of storytelling and how the modern world has evolved the subjects of our media.
The first volume of Mezolith collects stories about Poika, an adolescent of the Kansa tribe, and his interactions with the people in his life. Poika represents the archetypal wide-eyed boy on the course to manhood, and as a result, through hunting journeys and conversations with elders, he learns more about his role in his family and tribe and the greater Earth. While the volume opens up with Poika’s losing battle against a bull, his arrival to manhood has little to do with fights or violence: Poika’s key to becoming a man comes from his learnings about loss, love, respect, and courage through the members of his tribe.
Thus, the sections in volume one do not fluidly create an action driven plot; instead, they emerge as a sequence of vignettes where Poika learns something more about the world surrounding him. From the legend of the Urgas, creatures that start off as infants but transform into giants that consume humans once they have been adopted and cared for by a family, to the story of Korppi Vehlo, the healer who returned from the dead as half-woman and half-raven, each story contains the terrors of nature and the triumphs of humans and animals, creating a balance of emotions in each.
No story feels too sentimental, and no story feels too severe. The good cannot exist without the bad, and joy cannot exist without sorrow, and Poika learns this balance throughout this first volume of Mezolith.
For his first graphic novel, Haggarty successfully creates an imaginative and effective mythology in Mezolith with a limited amount of text. To fortify the fictional world that Haggarty expands, Adam Brockbank provides artwork that places you into Stone Age Britain. With Haggarty’s words, you learn the traditions and values of the Kansa tribe, and with Brockbank’s images, you observe how they came to be.
With Brockbank’s art, you can almost smell the surrounding trees, feel the snow compacting underneath your feet, and see all of the features of each of the characters as if they stood in front of you. Brockbank’s film background serves him well in Mezolith; the art nearly has the richness of a time based medium.
So, after you see Deadpool this weekend, do take some time to pick up Mezolith next week. It will balance out your palette, since after watching over an hour of a smart-ass antihero in modern America, you will want a chaser of something as fundamental in its approach to fiction as Mezolith.
Neither work is completely innovative or groundbreaking, but side-by-side they provide an excellent comparison of changes in archetypes and themes over time.
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