Swan Songs #3 // Review
Two kids emerge from their bunkers. It looks like a nuclear war probably broke out. She had been waiting out the holocaust by watching Little House on the Prairie and doing sudoku. He had done the same while reading zombie apocalypse novels. Her name's Adeline. His name's Evan. This is another ending. This is Swan Songs #3. Writer W. Maxwell Prince tells another tale at the end of another moment with artist Filipe Andrade. The story itself is not terribly original. The idiosyncrasies of the narrative are both visually and linguistically fun. As a result, it's kind of a fun issue of a reliably good series thus far.
When the two kids get out into the post-apocalyptic wasteland, there really is a hell of a lot of exploring to do. And a lot of work as well. The names of bird with antennae "bird with antennae." They spot a bunch of stuff fused into the form of a tree...and so they call it "tree." And they were able to find enough stuff to build a farm in the shadow of the tree. It's all very simple. It's all very primal. But things are going to get complicated. They always do.
Prince takes a little while to set things up. So much of the early going of the story feels almost painfully cliché. But he puts it together in a way that is charming enough to keep the pages turning until things tilt dramatically somewhere around the middle of the issue. At that stage, the story gets really interesting. If things get weird. Things get ugly. What starts off as a cheesy, little sci-fi mutation of the Book of Genesis quickly becomes something much darker and more sinister on a whole bunch of different levels. It's probably not as brilliant as it wants to be, but it certainly is a lot of fun.
Andrade's art finds a very expressive atmosphere throughout the issue. There are a couple of major scene changes that could have been amplified a bit by drastically different art styles for each of the settings. Andrade is much better with mood than he is with technical darkness. And it's that technical darkness that really could have used a completely different approach to storytelling than the early scenes with Adeline and Evan. That being said, Andre has a very powerful impact with his art, which does a brilliant job of bringing everything together.
It's the end of the world. Again. And it's fun to explore just a little bit more. However, it doesn't seem to add a whole lot to questions posed by the end of humanity. There is no whole lot of insight into what's being developed in this story. It's just a really fun end-of-the-world story. And maybe it doesn't need to be any more than that. But one can't help but get the feeling that maybe there is something deeper that could have been developed out of the story if Prince could have found something a bit more inventive.
