Review: That Distant Fire (2022)
30ish Comics in 30 Days - I’m reviewing a comic almost every day in November. I missed a few days but there are no rules here, I can do what I want.
Day 19 - That Distant Fire by JR Hughto and Curt Merlo
I was predisposed to love this book – and I'm acutely unhappy to report that I did not.
That Distant Fire is a story about a labor uprising and the people whose lives it upends. It’s science fiction that explicitly references Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. It tackles challenging ideas about community and corporate power and the cops. This is the shit I like! These are things I see so rarely in fiction, and we need more graphic novels (and prose novels) with this kind of radical imagination!
Unfortunately, this particular one didn’t live up to my hopes. I had a few problems with it, including some small but basic composition choices that interfered with the narrative flow. But my main frustration is that it tells a story that hinges on characters and their decisions but never spends enough time with them to let us truly understand those decisions.
A good example is the narrative’s driving force, a militant lesbian labor organizer named Diana. She’s impulsive, brash, and a disruptive, fiery presence in the lives of the other characters. Yet we never learn much about why she acts the way she does. We're introduced to her by way of a four-page speech that articulates her radical vision of revolution. But the story never pulls back the curtain of ideology to seriously examine who she is and why she believes in fighting for a better world. (I can say the same of the other characters as well, even those that get more development than Diana.)
I really do want radical comics to thrive, and it pains me not to be able to give That Distant Fire a glowing review. But it would pain me more not to share my honest criticism, and despite the often beautiful artwork and use of color – which is striking – I could not like this book.
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