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Who Said Unicorns Were Majestic?

Who Said Unicorns Were Majestic?

A review of Katie Shanahan and Steven Shanahan’s Silly Kingdom: A New Steed Indeed (www.sillykingdom.com , 2105)

People frequently portray unicorns as majestic, gentle, caring creatures… but not the Shanahans. In their comic Silly Kingdom: A New Steed Indeed, The Prince becomes obsessed with the fact that a neighbouring prince, Peatrid, manages to have a pet unicorn where The Prince only has the traditional steed of his kingdom… the llama. Obsessed with beating his rival, The Prince heads out with Markus The Kingdom Jester in search of a rare Nocturnal Black Unicorn.

He quickly discovers that his prey is far less gentle than he had assumed… and far more of a trickster herself. In a set of Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner-like attempts to catch the unicorn, The Prince and Markus end up realizing that the unicorn they are searching for has a wicked sense of humour and a lot of attitude.

Like their first Silly Kingdom comic, Katie and Steven Shanahan combine the magical with the hilarious, bringing the reader on a ridiculous adventure into a world of mishaps and magic. In this second comic, the Shanahans focus even more on the visual than they had in their first comic, stepping away from the conversion from radio play to graphic medium and instead getting into the storytelling power of images. They allow the images on the page to tell their own stories, relying on the power of expressive faces to reveal their own internal narrative and set the tone for dialogue that is used.

To find out more about Silly Kingdom: A New Steed Indeed and the work of Katie and Steven Shanahan, visit http://sillykingdom.tumblr.com/about

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A Necromantic Frankenstein

Check out my review of Kenneth Oppel’s “Such Wicked Intent”, a story of Victor Frankenstein’s early life experimenting with alchemy and the body.

Also, while you are checking it, check out this other kickstarter for Frankenstein stories – We Shall Be Monsters at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1357195744/we-shall-be-monsters?ref=cijr21&token=126156be

We Shall Be Monsters

A Necromantic Frankenstein

A review of Kenneth Oppel’s Such Wicked Intent: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein Book 2 (Harper Collins, 2012)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Kenneth Oppel’s Such Wicked Intent takes the Frankenstein story into a darker space where alchemy and trips to the underworld shape Victor Frankenstein’s quest for knowledge. Oppel imagines Victor Frankenstein not just as a scientist, but as a man who craves any kind of knowledge and power.

In Oppel’s first Apprenticeship of Frankenstein book, This Dark Endeavour, Victor begins meddling with alchemical knowledge as a way to construct a cure for his twin brother, Konrad’s illness but eventually discovers that alchemy is substanceless and ultimately ineffective. Now that Konrad is dead, Victor again goes searching through ancient tomes, believing that he has the knowledge and power to change his brother’s death. He is fuelled by grief, but also by his own belief that he has…

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Wiley, Weird, and Wizardly

Wiley, Weird, and Wizardly

A review of Katie Shanahan and Steven Shanahan’s Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday (www.sillykingdom.com, 2011)

By Derek Newman-Stille

I just got back from the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and one of the first things that caught my attention was a short comic by Katie and Sreven Shanahan called Silly Kingdom.

As adorable as it is hilarious, Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday is a tale of the magical in the mundane. It is a story of magical mishaps and jealousy by a 211 year old wizard who is jealous of a jester who performs magic tricks as part of his act. Katie and Steven Shanahan’s playfulness suffuses every page of this short comic involving an overly optimistic princess and a prince who enters far too easily into existential crises. This is a cute, fast paced, and exciting comic that brings humour and the fantastic together.

Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday was originally a radio play that was adapted into graphic form, providing a fascinating view on the process of converting a tale from one format to another. One would think this would create a text-heavy comic, but the Shanahans have been able to adapt the story effectively to graphic novel pacing. The story is as much told by the hyper-expressive facial features and exuberance of movement by the characters as it is by the dialogue.

To discover more about Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday and about the ongoing work of Katie and Steven Shanahan, go to http://sillykingdom.tumblr.com/about

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WONDERful

Wonderful

A review of Cait Gordon’s A Night at The Rabbit Hole in Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland edited by Colleen Anderson (Exile, 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Alice in Wonderland is a story that plays with identity, disrupting the power that normativity has on our society. Cait Gordon has tapped into that power that Wonderland has to resist normativity and creates a GenderQueer Alice who has just come out and taken on their new name and pronouns. It is refreshing to read a story featuring a GenderQueer character that is not about the struggles of occupying their identity. In A Night at The Rabbit Hole, Alice is instantly accepted for their gender and people don’t slip up and refer to them as anything other than “them” after one quick correction.

Gordon uses the Alice in Wonderland text for its power to disrupt power structures that erase identity possibilities and instead writes a story filled with potential and possibility.

A Night at the Rabbit Hole is a tale about a meeting in a dance club where Alice is given a pill that transforms their perspective and gives them an expanded view of the world around them, allowing them to see through human disguises to the creatures beneath. Gordon plays with the question of what could alter someone’s perspective like the “drink me” potion and mushroom that Alice takes in Carroll’s story and ultimately comes up with the connection to club drugs. After Alice took their pill (here called a “tart”), I have to admit that the Jefferson Airplane song White Rabbit was running through my head as Alice’s perspectives were warped, and I think that Gordon intended to plant this trippy tune in the minds of her readers.

Cait Gordon’s characteristic playfulness comes through in this tale of altered reality and questioned norms and she invites readers to chuckle at clever witticisms at the same time as they speculate about possibilities beyond the simple world that they live in. This is a story that empowers at the same time as it entertains

To discover more about Alice Unbound, go to http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/alice-unbound-beyond-wonderland/

To find out more about Cait Gordon, visit her website at https://caitgordon.com

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A War Across the Glass

A War Across The Glass

A review of Patrick Bollivar’s “Operation: Looking Glass” in Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland Edited by Colleen Anderson (Exile 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

It turns out Wonderland isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Patrick Bollivar’s “Operation: Looking Glass” explores a group of people who are in a battle with Wonderland to get their sister back. The Wonderland that Bollivar envisions is one that is at war with the human world and at war with itself. It is suffused with an aether, an air that transforms people and animals who cross through the looking glass into this strange world.

Bollivar imagines the potential for Wonderland to have a contagious effect but unites this contagious transformation with a specific location – Wonderland. The contagious effect varies, but it changes people’s personalities and ideologies and it changes animals into hybridized figures with human and animal characteristics. This Wonderland has been at war with itself, conflicted both in terms of its inherent contradictions but also literally engaged in battle.

Bollivar creates a steampunkesque diving story, but this particular group of adventurers are diving into another world… though one that they need as much protection from as they would at the bottom of the ocean.

Like many of the authors in Alice Unbound, Bollivar unites aspects of Lewis Carroll’s life with the world that he created when he wrote Wonderland, and this particular tale involves the Liddell children, who served as inspirations for Carroll’s writing. The characters in Bollivar’s tale call Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland a propagandist text, ignoring the real horrors of Wonderland.

This is a highly exciting steampunk story that provides a contrast between the rational world and the world of dangerous whimsy that lay on the other side of a simple sheet of glass.

To find out more about Alice Unbound, visit Exile’s website at http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/alice-unbound-beyond-wonderland/

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O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!

O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!

A review of Kate Story’s This Insubstantial Pageant (ChiZine Publications, 2017)

By Derek Newman-Stille

A fan of both Shakespeare and science fiction, Kate Story remaps the Bard’s play The Tempest onto the stars, exploring the otherworldly potential of the tale by placing it on another planet in a distant future. Frequently, Shakespearian adaptations situate the Bard’s tales in the past or in a slightly altered present, but Story imagines the potential for Shakespeare’s works to take to the stars, exploring the adaptability of his plays and their ability to speak to a fundamental human nature.

The Tempest is a tale set on an island and the stars represent a powerful space for imagining isolation and insularity. This Insubstantial Pageant is able to examine a fundamentally alien environment by setting the tale on a distant planet and therefore captures the sense of alienness that Shakespeare’s island narrative was able to do – exploring a space where there are different customs, different bodies, and experiences that challenge human centrality. Kate Story’s planet is one that is primarily filled with plant life and occupied by a group of sentient plants.

This Insubstantial Pageant reimagines the themes of Shakespeare’s play to explore modern issues that are linked to notions of futurity, shifting family and political alliances to corporate ones, exploring a world of corporate power. Instead of magic as the Pandora’s box that Prospero opens, Prosperina opens the doors of genetic experimentation, altering genomes and biologically changing the inhabitants of this distant planet so that they can interact with humanity. Rather than monsters being created through an otherworldly magic, in This Insubstantial Pageant, monsters are created through contamination by human genetic material, revealing that (unlike in Shakespeare’s story) it is not the Other that we should fear… but, rather, the human. We are the ones that contaminate. She expands on the alien quality of Caliban by transforming him into an actual alien Kaleeban… but his aggression, his ‘savageness’ is not through his lack of Western cultural influences as in Shakespeare’s tale, but rather it is because of his human elements, because he has been made to be more like us.

Kate Story disrupts some of the colonial qualities of Shakespeare’s tale by not creating a meeting of civilization and barbarity, but instead noting that humans carry both with them and observing the damage that our colonization can do. It is Prosperina’s genetic altering of the planet she occupies, an act done to reshape a world to fit her needs, that is ultimately her downfall.

To discover more about the work of Kate Story, visit http://www.katestory.com

To discover more about This Insubstantial Pageant, visit ChiZine Publications’ website at https://chizinepub.com/this-insubstantial-pageant/

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Bordered by Change

Bordered by Change

A review of Shades Within Us edited by Lucas K Law and Susan Forest (Laksa Media Groups Inc, 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Borders are complex spaces of change and uncertainty where identities are made and also complicated. Lucas Law and Susan Forest’s Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders examines this complex space of border crossing, that ultimate liminality that invites questions about categories. The stories in this collection invite us to interrogate the ways that we divide up our world including, but not limited to geography. These tales ask how borders try to limit us and what it means to transcend those limitations, to question them, and to defy them.

These are tales of displacement, loss, and cultural assimilation, but they are also tales of coming together, of community formation beyond limits, and of speculating the new borders of the future. These tales explore the way that border-crossing can be a painful process, a process of losing person freedoms, having to navigate new ways of defining identity, and interrogating what ideas like “home” and “belonging” mean when we move.

In an era of globalization and yet also an era of increased border control and hegemonic control over who can and cannot come into a country, Shades Within Us is a timely collection that invites us to ask whether we still do (or still should) live in a space of national borders and national definitions of identity. It invites us to use our speculative imagination to think through new ways of understanding selfhood in relation to the borders, boxes, and categories that are placed around us.

As much as Shades Within Us is about the physical crossing of borders, it is more about the psychological borders that we cross, the way that we reconceptualize ourselves and imagine ourselves differently.

To discover more about Shades Within Us, visit http://laksamedia.com/shades-within-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause/

To read reviews of a few of the individual stories in this collection, see these posts:

Tonya Liburd’s Superfreak

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2018/02/10/abuse-and-ideas-of-home/

Kate Heartfield’s Gilber Tong’s Life List

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2018/02/09/eco-refugees/

Rich Larson’s Porque El Girasol se Llama El Girasol

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2018/02/06/border-walls-and-barriers/

Karin Lowachee’s Invasio

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2018/02/03/confusion/