Sunday Comics: Shadoweyes

Shadoweyes, by Ross Campbell

Format: Graphic Novel

Content Rating: PG bordering on PG-13, for violence and a few generally disturbing moments/images.

Plot: Somewhere in a vast future city,  subtly implied to be after some great disaster, a high-school girl named Scout has a dream of being a vigilante. Taking the name Shadoweyes, she sets out on stopping her first mugging...and fails miserably. After taking a brick to the face, she suddenly finds that at night time, she now mutates into an incredibly strong, resiliant creature, at the cost of extremely photosensitive eyes. After only a few nights of shifting back and forth, however, the transformation becomes permanent, and she's stuck in her superhuman-but-inhuman form seemingly forever. What follows is as much about getting used to her new identity and body as it is about any sort of vigilante work.

Thoughts: After lots of Wet Moon (still eagerly awaiting volume 6!), it's interesting to see Ross Campbell do a superhero story. It has a lot of the recognizable elements of one, while still being unmistakably his. It is a little breath of fresh air for me for that genre, especially as Marvel and DC continue to jade me more and more each year in their race to see who can top each other in the next year's wave of (impermanent, tangled, sensationalistic) "event arcs" that have now become the bland norm for them. Shadoweyes, from a superhero standpoint, especially takes me back to the early days of Spider-Man, when the hero still didn't really know what they were capable of, made mistakes, were new to the whole heroing business. Except Shadoweyes also has the convenience of a little bit of self-awareness--the characters are fully aware of superhero tropes, and many of the things that now stand out as kind of odd about classic superheroes (such as making a costume almost immediately after recieving their powers) are much less so in the context of someone who already knows about superheroes. (Shadoweyes' costume is very simple and practical, designed seemingly to be easily replaced as it gets torn up in fights, but the why of it still remains as "I guess I should have a costume, since I'm kind of a superhero." And it works.)
     The "secret identity" trope common to these stories is for now, still intact, but it appears to be breaking down slowly--a few people close to Scout have found out by this volume's end. What strikes me as odd in that regard is how calm they are about it--particularly Scout's best friend Kyisha, who appears entirely unfazed by the whole thing. Personally if my best friend had just inexplicably turned into something that looked like a small, chubby Xenomorph, I would kind of freak out a little. In fact, if I can recall correctly, not a single person in the story really reacts to her new appearance beyond "wow, that must be weird." Maybe Dranac (the city) is just filled with that much oddity already and we haven't seen it yet? Although surreal elements are certainly no stranger at all to Campbell's work (see: the strong supernatural elements and jarring symbolism moments of Wet Moon and every single daydream/hallucination scene in Water Baby).
     The other thing here that seems to work for Campbell's other comics but not as much here is how many questions he leaves unanswered. Wet Moon in particular often leaves unanswered questions in individual volumes but has such a strong sense of continuity that you know these will be addressed (and have been) at later points. Here, though Shadoweyes is set up as a series as well (I hear the second volume drops soon), the fact that there's so little we know hurts it a bit predominantly because it's the first volume of something that's tonally much less connected to the prior work of his I'm familiar with, and because a superhero story in particular has certain things it really should establish within its first issue or volume or whatever format you're working in. Though Shadoweyes entertained and intrigued me, by the end of volume one we still don't know much about Scout as a character, we have no hints as to the origin of her powers or why she has them, and we don't know the villain's true origin, motives, or even name. Now, having all of these answered would spoil things and provide too much of a clash to Campbell's preference to tell a story slowly, but I feel like a couple of them being answered--or even just subtly implied--would have helped me forge just a bit more connection to the story and possibly provide further analysis. Perhaps we'll see if any are brought up in the next volume, now that it seems like a lot of other major pieces are in place. The first one was definitely still interesting enough that I'll be looking forward to more.

[Holden Out.]