Comics Rec: A Distant Soil (Colleen Doran)
Tuesday, 4 March 2008 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siguneTo be honest, when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bettyboop_comic first gave me a synopsis of A Distant Soil I was quite sure I wasn't going to like it, even if he claimed the opposite thing. He lent me his copy of the first trade paperback, "The Gathering", despite my warning him that there was no way I was going to buy my own. But I took the book home and started to read, and read on and on and on and then I reached the back cover and e-mailed bettyboop_comic to ask how many of those books had come out and could I please buy them all at once and did he have loose issues too so I didn't have to wait for the next trade?
*g*
My explanation for my instinctive dislike and how easily (and thoroughly) it was overcome is that for me the strength of A Distant Soil lies in Colleen Doran's unique treatment of her story, not in the tale itself. In someone else's hands, the premises of the plot might have resulted in horrible cliché and annoying melodrama - two things to which I am very (according tobettyboop_comic overly) sensitive and that put me off a story, book or film immediately.
Warning: this rec is a bit longish. That sometimes happens when I start to talk about books that I love to bits... *blushes*
A summary of A Distant Soil's starting point sounds like the kind of story I used to invent when I was in my early teens:
Liana Scott is the most powerful girl in the universe: she is an Avatar, capable of wielding the combined mental powers of a whole world, of the collective thought and imagination of a thinking race. The government has killed her family and locked Liana and her elder brother Jason up in a mental institution, where scientists attempt to exploit their gifts. Jason and Liana manage to escape from the institute, only to be traced by people from a faraway planet - some with good, and others with bad intentions. It is soon revealed that the children's father was a political refugee from the planet Ovanan, and they derive their special powers from him. The Hierarchy, the leaders of Ovanan, have crossed the galaxy in a huge warship with the intention of destroying Jason and Liana, and the entire planet Earth for good measure. But the Resistance, a group of rebels headed by the Ovanan Rieken, have every intention of thwarting that plan. Rieken comes to search for human champions to help save Earth, assembling a colourful cast containing the policeman Minetti, the street-wise young Hawaiian Brent, medical student Chris, the homeless Reynaldo, Russian dissident Serezha, fashion designer Corrine and her friend the Faery Dunstan, the shape-shifting Ovanan exile Bast, and last but not least (you'd better believe it) Sir Galahad, knight of the Round Table. Rieken smuggles his champions on board of the Hierarchy's space ship, and intrigue, action, manipulation, romance and clever dialogue are their part...
I thought that mixing every single bit of story that you like in one tale was a typical teenage thing - I remember one particular exploit in which I placed the Count of Flanders, Arthurian lore, Lloyd Alexander elements, and Egyptian myth in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves :P. And guess what: Colleen Doran actually DID conceive the story of A Distant Soil when she was in her early teens, and started publishing her comic at the tender age of fifteen. It shows in the basic material - but in the meantime Doran has become a consummate professional, and that certainly shows too. She pulls it off, and how! Doran has a keen sense for making good use of those elements in her eclectic story that would make lesser gods stumble, and she never takes the easy way out. The result is a character-driven, witty, intelligent and thrilling space opera, told in gorgeous black-and-white art. Oh, and it contains slash ;-).
Doran is not afraid of issues like child abuse, racism and slavery, and somehow manages to be sufficiently profound without getting heavy-handed. Her characters are not really to be envied - they live through horrible things - but Doran has the necessary sense of humour to provide little lights in the darkness.
(c) Colleen Doran
Seren and D'mer, Liana and Jason.
I guess the main attraction of A Distant Soil to me is the characters. The cast is large, but the members are all clearly individualised, with their own motivations and strengths and flaws, which makes it difficult for me to choose a favourite among them. Now, if I could swap Bast for Jason, the picture above would show what are pretty much the series Fab Four for me :-).
Bast, the shape-changer, most of the time shows herself as a gorgeous black woman with long legs and huge breasts. I guess she would be a bit of a cliché figure if the other characters didn't comment on her looks all the time; one of the less flattering epithets she received comes from D'mer, who once called her "that ambulatory bosom". Bast and D'mer can't stand each other, and because they are both sharp-tongued, their confrontations yield highly entertaining verbal skirmishes. They are rivals for Seren's love, and both are dominant. Bast is a strong character, and also a rather grey one; the others don't trust her, and it is indeed difficult to be sure about her motivations and loyalties. I think she's cool ;-).
D'mer is at one point described by Niniri as a "snide little catamite". Well, he is that, but there is much more to him. He grows as a character throughout the series from a kind of servant or bodyguard to a leader figure, and his relationship with Seren gets more complex and psychologically interesting.
Seren, Ovanan's Avatar, is perhaps my absolute favourite, if I have to choose one. He is emotionally needy, writes bad poetry, and sometimes behaves like a sulky child. According to his people's standards, he is not yet of age, but I am not sure how his age is supposed to translate into mortal years. Seren has convinced his enemies that he is an idiot and a weakling, but in fact he is a leader who shoulders enormous responsibilities and plays dangerous games with the Hierarchy - yes, I do have a soft spot for characters who pretend to be something that they are not :-). Apart from all that, Seren is also very, very cute in an almost girlish sort of way. Sneaky, but adorable. Unfortunately for him, he is the villains' favourite plaything :/.
Like Seren, Liana is very young - she is fifteen, but the Ovanan part of her genes make her look and sound even younger. She is innocent and child-like but never boring. I think that Liana could easily have been a Mary Sue, but she isn't one at all. She may have enormous psychic powers, but she is untrained and does not know how to handle them very well. Liana doesn't enjoy her powers, but Doran doesn't exploit the tragedy of them either; her heroine just copes as best she can.
Despite the sci-fi, the magic and the superpowers, Doran's characters are very human, and her heroes have a hard time struggling against a set of magnificent villains. Oh, those villains... Forget Lord Voldemort: Doran's lot are efficient and intelligent as well as cruel and ruthless, and they get much better results - so much so that I am to this day far from sure that the heroes will succeed in their objectives, and quite convinced that if they do, there will be a serious price to pay.
...Okay, I admit that the truly creepy villains are probably responsible for the fact that ADS, unlike Potter, has a mature target audience. I guess the rating would be PG-13/R.
There are four trade paperbacks of A Distant Soil published with Image Comics so far; the fifth will end the series. They are all available from Amazon.
You can read the first issue of ADS for free at the series' website. A word of warning, though: the art in the earliest issues is not really representative of the series' look. The saga is a long-term project and Doran's art matures a lot along the way; in my opinion it really comes into its own in the last two issues that comprise the first collection.
bettyboop_comic first gave me a synopsis of A Distant Soil I was quite sure I wasn't going to like it, even if he claimed the opposite thing. He lent me his copy of the first trade paperback, "The Gathering", despite my warning him that there was no way I was going to buy my own. But I took the book home and started to read, and read on and on and on and then I reached the back cover and e-mailed bettyboop_comic to ask how many of those books had come out and could I please buy them all at once and did he have loose issues too so I didn't have to wait for the next trade?*g*
My explanation for my instinctive dislike and how easily (and thoroughly) it was overcome is that for me the strength of A Distant Soil lies in Colleen Doran's unique treatment of her story, not in the tale itself. In someone else's hands, the premises of the plot might have resulted in horrible cliché and annoying melodrama - two things to which I am very (according to
bettyboop_comic overly) sensitive and that put me off a story, book or film immediately. Warning: this rec is a bit longish. That sometimes happens when I start to talk about books that I love to bits... *blushes*
A summary of A Distant Soil's starting point sounds like the kind of story I used to invent when I was in my early teens:
Liana Scott is the most powerful girl in the universe: she is an Avatar, capable of wielding the combined mental powers of a whole world, of the collective thought and imagination of a thinking race. The government has killed her family and locked Liana and her elder brother Jason up in a mental institution, where scientists attempt to exploit their gifts. Jason and Liana manage to escape from the institute, only to be traced by people from a faraway planet - some with good, and others with bad intentions. It is soon revealed that the children's father was a political refugee from the planet Ovanan, and they derive their special powers from him. The Hierarchy, the leaders of Ovanan, have crossed the galaxy in a huge warship with the intention of destroying Jason and Liana, and the entire planet Earth for good measure. But the Resistance, a group of rebels headed by the Ovanan Rieken, have every intention of thwarting that plan. Rieken comes to search for human champions to help save Earth, assembling a colourful cast containing the policeman Minetti, the street-wise young Hawaiian Brent, medical student Chris, the homeless Reynaldo, Russian dissident Serezha, fashion designer Corrine and her friend the Faery Dunstan, the shape-shifting Ovanan exile Bast, and last but not least (you'd better believe it) Sir Galahad, knight of the Round Table. Rieken smuggles his champions on board of the Hierarchy's space ship, and intrigue, action, manipulation, romance and clever dialogue are their part...
I thought that mixing every single bit of story that you like in one tale was a typical teenage thing - I remember one particular exploit in which I placed the Count of Flanders, Arthurian lore, Lloyd Alexander elements, and Egyptian myth in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves :P. And guess what: Colleen Doran actually DID conceive the story of A Distant Soil when she was in her early teens, and started publishing her comic at the tender age of fifteen. It shows in the basic material - but in the meantime Doran has become a consummate professional, and that certainly shows too. She pulls it off, and how! Doran has a keen sense for making good use of those elements in her eclectic story that would make lesser gods stumble, and she never takes the easy way out. The result is a character-driven, witty, intelligent and thrilling space opera, told in gorgeous black-and-white art. Oh, and it contains slash ;-).
Doran is not afraid of issues like child abuse, racism and slavery, and somehow manages to be sufficiently profound without getting heavy-handed. Her characters are not really to be envied - they live through horrible things - but Doran has the necessary sense of humour to provide little lights in the darkness.
(c) Colleen Doran
Seren and D'mer, Liana and Jason.
I guess the main attraction of A Distant Soil to me is the characters. The cast is large, but the members are all clearly individualised, with their own motivations and strengths and flaws, which makes it difficult for me to choose a favourite among them. Now, if I could swap Bast for Jason, the picture above would show what are pretty much the series Fab Four for me :-).
Bast, the shape-changer, most of the time shows herself as a gorgeous black woman with long legs and huge breasts. I guess she would be a bit of a cliché figure if the other characters didn't comment on her looks all the time; one of the less flattering epithets she received comes from D'mer, who once called her "that ambulatory bosom". Bast and D'mer can't stand each other, and because they are both sharp-tongued, their confrontations yield highly entertaining verbal skirmishes. They are rivals for Seren's love, and both are dominant. Bast is a strong character, and also a rather grey one; the others don't trust her, and it is indeed difficult to be sure about her motivations and loyalties. I think she's cool ;-).
D'mer is at one point described by Niniri as a "snide little catamite". Well, he is that, but there is much more to him. He grows as a character throughout the series from a kind of servant or bodyguard to a leader figure, and his relationship with Seren gets more complex and psychologically interesting.
Seren, Ovanan's Avatar, is perhaps my absolute favourite, if I have to choose one. He is emotionally needy, writes bad poetry, and sometimes behaves like a sulky child. According to his people's standards, he is not yet of age, but I am not sure how his age is supposed to translate into mortal years. Seren has convinced his enemies that he is an idiot and a weakling, but in fact he is a leader who shoulders enormous responsibilities and plays dangerous games with the Hierarchy - yes, I do have a soft spot for characters who pretend to be something that they are not :-). Apart from all that, Seren is also very, very cute in an almost girlish sort of way. Sneaky, but adorable. Unfortunately for him, he is the villains' favourite plaything :/.
Like Seren, Liana is very young - she is fifteen, but the Ovanan part of her genes make her look and sound even younger. She is innocent and child-like but never boring. I think that Liana could easily have been a Mary Sue, but she isn't one at all. She may have enormous psychic powers, but she is untrained and does not know how to handle them very well. Liana doesn't enjoy her powers, but Doran doesn't exploit the tragedy of them either; her heroine just copes as best she can.
Despite the sci-fi, the magic and the superpowers, Doran's characters are very human, and her heroes have a hard time struggling against a set of magnificent villains. Oh, those villains... Forget Lord Voldemort: Doran's lot are efficient and intelligent as well as cruel and ruthless, and they get much better results - so much so that I am to this day far from sure that the heroes will succeed in their objectives, and quite convinced that if they do, there will be a serious price to pay.
...Okay, I admit that the truly creepy villains are probably responsible for the fact that ADS, unlike Potter, has a mature target audience. I guess the rating would be PG-13/R.
There are four trade paperbacks of A Distant Soil published with Image Comics so far; the fifth will end the series. They are all available from Amazon.
You can read the first issue of ADS for free at the series' website. A word of warning, though: the art in the earliest issues is not really representative of the series' look. The saga is a long-term project and Doran's art matures a lot along the way; in my opinion it really comes into its own in the last two issues that comprise the first collection.
