Twig #2 // Review
A furry, little adventurer is embroiled in strange challenges that find him in over his head with nothing but grit, determination, and a pet slug to aid him. Writer Skottie Young continues the five-part journey of Twig in a second issue that is once again conjured into the visual by artist Kyle Strahm. The big adventure continues to move on into bigger and bigger realms with a quick look ahead that promises strange new danger. Young and Strahm’s world develops beautifully in the second issue of a promising, new mini-series.
Twig found a captivating red crystal. The death of the Pathsayer complicates the journey of Twig and Splat, who use weird magic tech to try to discover the true nature of the blood-red stone. They are successful enough to find an ominous vision of great danger, but they ALSO find that the precious, little artifact has been deeply damaged in the process...and so Furry hero and snail sidekick must travel to an even more strange and wondrous oracle to discover what they might be able to do to repair the crystal...a complicated adventure in its own right.
Young’s work synthesizes with the artist remarkably well. Just as his Middlewest worked well with the rich, accented detail of artist Jorge Corona, Twig finds a delicious, little fantasy world for the Muppety, Henson-esque work of Strahm. Much of Young’s success in this series thus far lies in his ability to allow the artist’s work to breathe without pounding too much story around the edges. The weird machine that the title character uses to gain the vision could have been far too easily cluttered by unnecessary dialogue. The landscape of fantasy that populates Twig’s world could have been overpowered by world-building dialogue. There’s a poetry in Young’s approach to world-building with Twig that is as clever as it is whimsical.
Strahm’s art has some very engaging visuals in the foreground. Twig is cute and expressive with fur and eyes, but Splat is just as cute with winding, little rubbery yellow limbs and the clingy curviness of his little body. The world beyond the two protagonists crosses somewhere between high fantasy and delightfully strange steampunk. The distinct visual personality of Twig goes a long way towards making the entire story worth reading, even if Young isn’t developing anything that hasn’t been found in legends, folk tales, movies, TV, video games, and other narrative forms countless times in the past.
The overall story is nothing terribly new to the world of adventure fantasy, but Young and Strahm are developing something with a footprint all its own. Twig is a genuinely unique hero due to the delicate interplay between the dialogue in Young’s writing and the expressiveness of Strahm’s visual work. The furry little adventurer is off to a strong start in the first half of his series. If he can make it through the middle of the series with the same charm, Young and Strahm may really have something here.
