Review by Frank Plowright

It’s been an awful long time since someone involved with comics took on the cartoon world intersecting with reality, yet comics is the ideal medium for such messing with the mind. Grant Morrison is the most prominent practitioner with a memorable outing for Animal Man, and then Happy, and we now have Tony Fleecs and Dave Wachter exploring the idea, and they take it further.

The obvious first hurdle to cartoons interacting with reality is handled in the sample art. Humans simply don’t see them as such. By then there’s already been a subtle introduction to the idea via three boys jumping off a bridge. Two of them break their legs, but Oliver gets up from within a cartoon style impression in the ground. He’s about to learn his heritage and why it is he and his mother keep moving from town to town.

Oliver’s a great introduction to a world that completely messes with his idea of reality. It’s a world where his grandfather can paint a tunnel on a mountain and then use it, or a dingo can pull a stick of dynamite from somewhere within their fur. It’s a steep learning curve, but Fleecs also drops ideas destined to come to later fruition.

Beginning with characters similar to those from the classic Warner Brothers cartoons, Fleecs and Wachter gradually expand to a broader cast encompassing versions of characters from TV animation. Previous artists tackling the idea in comics haven’t always been the most adaptable, but Wachter’s version of conjoined realities is solid and credible, and it’s matched by Fleecs’ nuanced characterisation in having the personalities and the reactions of cartoon people less complicated than humans.

Volume One’s final chapter is an affirmation of how clever Uncanny Valley is. The progression of the planet is inextricably linked to the history of animation, and there’s the added surprise revelation as to who chief antagonist the First actually is, although smarter readers may have already figured that out.

Bold and enterprising, Uncanny Valley is also humane and thoughtful in supplying an extremely unusual supernatural fantasy.