Review by Frank Plowright

The name of Benedict Arnold is reviled in US history as a traitor who attempted to surrender a strategically important area to the British in 1780. For the sake of his Odyssey, Ian Herring imagines his experiences as deviating considerably from the known record.

Arnold’s hallucinogenic odyssey begins with him awakening on a beach and chasing a cat into a garden, whereupon he’s questioned as to his sins of the past, apparently quoted from his own works. Escaping that, he takes a dive into the unknown and ends up being pulled from the sea onto a ship where he’s recognised as a traitor and an attempt is made to hang him. He wriggles out of that also, and into another situation, and so it continues for 160 pages.

It’s all very neatly drawn, and the fantastical ever-shifting scenarios permit Herring to illustrate whatever he feels like, be it an Orca in a medieval mansion or Mata Hari seducing German officers and dignitaries. For some reason, though, Herring avoids all facial features, at a stroke removing almost all emotion from an already distanced story. An occasional surprise, for no obvious reason, is shifting from two tone art into russet coloured digital painting.

Arnold trips from place to place meeting people and extricating himself from surreal scrapes, but there’s little narrative in the conventional sense. At one point he quotes Mata Hari’s final letter in which she claims everything to be an illusion, and perhaps that’s the starting point for this strange graphic novel. Depending on where he turns up, Arnold is experiencing the past and the future, but the constant stream of dreamlike experiences is initially novel, but with no respite fails to hold the interest over 150 pages.

A further three volumes follow, still available from publisher Mongoose Press, but it’ll be an exceptionally hopeful person who ventures further.