Reading Comics #75 "BlueSpear"

Andi Ewington's Forty-Five was one of the most innovative comics of the past few years.  It's a graphic novel comprised of interviews with or concerning forty-five superheroes.  BlueSpear is the followup that looks at one of the more notable characters from it.  Helpfully, it reprints the original interview and uses it as a springboard for another evolving storyarc, something Ewington cleverly employed in the original interviews as well.

Ever since Superman appeared everyone has been creating their own superhero landscapes.  While most companies try to create entire lines, some creators do it in a single story, with Kurt Busiek's Astro City perhaps the most notable example.  Ewington's tapestry was unique in that it bucked most comic book conventions, and on its own could easily have stood as a landmark of the medium.  He's since begun work on a trilogy of more conventional sequels, of which BlueSpear is the first.

BlueSpear himself is as much defined by his own emerging mythos as by his relationship with Akira Tomikawa, the brother of the boy who drowned in a fishing accident and emerged a superhero.  Both the interview and the spotlight graphic novel heavily feature this aspect of the character's story.  In fact, the original interview is taken with Akira, whose pathos is just one of the ways Ewington managed to evoke a realistic approach to the genre.  In BlueSpear Ewington works alongside Eddie Deighton, one of the managing editors of publisher Com.x, a small British imprint, as well as artist Cosmo White (replacing original interview artist Calum Alexander Watt; another notable element of Forty-Five was that there were as many artists as subjects).  White's work, beautifully enhanced by the pastel color scheme, is reminiscent of Jeff Smith, visionary creator of Bone and RASL.

Unlike with the interviews, this time a more identifiable story is necessary, and at first it's a little jarring to see this world expressed in more crass terms, but it quickly evens out over the course of forty pages (there are pin-ups that fill out the rest of the comic).  BlueSpear, so named because he discovered, well, a blue spear at the bottom of Funakoshi Bay in Tokyo that forever altered his destiny, ripping apart a family and making him an instant celebrity.  It also makes him a target for less savory individuals, who attempt to band together to steal the spear from him.  They use Akira as bait, naturally.

BlueSpear himself remains elusive even by the end of the story, the true details of how and why he was chosen by his signature weapon.  Whether additional volumes will focus on him or other creations from Forty-Five remains to be seen.  The project itself remains an exhilarating example of how superheroes can be approached both on an epic and human scale.