Review by Frank Plowright

Faceless and the Family is a wildly imaginative visual treat set on a planet shaped like a hand, featuring a journey of discovery and redemption for the nameless protagonist.

We first meet them pondering on their past, coerced by a gang into helping them on pain of their family being killed. When they meet others they refer to themselves as Faceless, and remain hidden throughout behind the ornate headgear seen on the sample art. Even when it’s partially raised for eating we’re not sure if Faceless is male or female, which is intriguing, although later illustrations reveal an Adam’s apple.

As Faceless leaves the city he encounters danger, and gradually gathers a few others around him, each of them also lost to a degree and definitely requiring comfort and friendship. We’re originally led to believe the family mentioned in the title are those Faceless warned to leave town to avoid retribution, but they’re actually the assorted misfits he gathers along the way. Their stories are gradually revealed, for better or worse, and as they forge ever nearer the rich end of the planet they have to weigh up their original aims against responsibility for their new companions.

The journey is a standard plot used by Matt Lesniewski for a meandering trip fraught with danger, but any plot is never more than the merest peg onto which Lesniewski hangs his extraordinary art. It’s toned black and white and underpinned by a unique creative mind. Faceless and the Family isn’t a project you could hand over to an identikit fill-in artist and have anywhere near the same effect. Lesniewski is particularly keen on eruptions throwing everything into the air and having the characters manoeuvring themselves across rapidly moving debris, often multitasking as they do so. There’s something of Alan Aldridge’s 1960s psychedelic approach, although that was in colour, mixed with the wild imaginings of Philippe Druillet, although Lesniewski is far more restrained. Those, though are just touchstones, and the phenomenal art is original.

Unfortunately, as with Druillet, the story doesn’t match the phenomenal designs, although they carry it an awful long way. The eventual revelations are tame melodrama, and everything just fades out. It’s a shame, but for plenty of readers the mind-expanding art will be enough.