Review by Frank Plowright
Swan Songs is six separate stories united by a single writer examining the theme of endings in the company of six different artists. In order, we have the end of life with the end of the world as a bonus; the end of a marriage; the end of the world again; the end of a prison sentence; the end of Anhedonia and the end of a sidewalk.
W. Maxwell Prince is already responsible for the varied selection of horrors found in Ice Cream Man, and quite honestly almost everything here could fit within that title’s format. Perhaps Prince is just too prolific for Martín Morazzo to keep up with, or perhaps he just fancied working with other artists for the change. Casper Wijngaard (sample art left), for instance, called on to illustrate the end of a marriage needs considerable artistic subtlety to illustrate the stages of disintegration, using historical battles as visual allusion. It’s a clever story on the final straw principle, showing how a clumsy reply at the wrong time illuminates simmering discontentment.
Just as the topic varies, Prince also varies the tone. His opener is a bleak meditation offering the slightest sliver of hope via the ridiculous, while acknowledging what has meaning differs from person to person. The second end of the world has more comedic moments, not least one survivor having grabbed zombie survival guides before entering the nuclear bunker. Whether by chance or design it’s also the most trivial inclusion. The most complex is a journey into the mind of a man unable to experience pleasure as they undergo a therapy session.
Just as no two stories are the same, the art is very different as each artist has their own approach. Filipe Andrade opts for single colour pastels, Martin Simmonds is very influenced by both the drawing and colour techniques of Bill Sienkiewicz, while Alex Eckman-Lawn offers a more original way of peeling back the human form. Caitlin Yarksy supplies naturalistic people with faces posed into distracting expressions. Her sample art also shows Prince using a clever narrative technique as the released prisoner attempts to make sense of the new world around him.
There’s almost nothing to differentiate the final inclusion from Prince’s work in Ice Cream Man, emphasised by the use of Morazzo as artist and an introduction from the frozen sweetness salesman himself. It’s a clever story darkly investigating a family where the husband and father is blighted by mental illness and the situation it leaves his wife and daughter in. Prince tells it via a series of gruesome rhyming poems, cleverly constructed to include a sardonic narrative voice.
Prince has an inventively disturbing mind, and those already fans of his work will be satisfied, while those unwilling to commit to the numerous volumes of Ice Cream Man to date can sample his appeal with Swan Songs.
