It’s used with great effect to convey how someone as delusionally ego-driven as Henry Henry can justify plagiarism, altering the reality around himself to be comfortable with artistic theft in a way that feels heroic, at least to him, anyway.
O’Sullivan continues to play with form for a third straight issue as he does this, putting rectangular narration boxes over the traditionally round word balloons during a mental episode, which creates a writer’s fantasy of what the hero wants to hear versus what’s really being said.
What’s most impressive to me about Fearscape #3, though, is how it shows rather than tells (that old creative writing canard) a set of feelings that are incredibly personal. Much of the rest of the issue is spent elucidating the mindstate of a plagiarist. Henry Henry is not finding a book he wrote without remembering Henry Henry is stealing whole a finished novel from a sick mentor. The found book is not the work of our hero, Henry Henry, but of the bed-bound mentor whose home he essentially burglarized in the first issue before being swept into the mythical realm of the Fearscape. It’s obviously not that easy (nothing is in Fearscape). It starts with what seems like a writer’s fantasy-finding a novel finished, exactly as you would have written it, without you having to do any of the actual work. This third issue opens with some of the delusion that has been present throughout. This combination of fearlessness and form is making for a compelling (and intensely singular) comic, one bent on examining why such feelings (as well as the actions they give rise to) occur, what they mean, and the damaging potential they can have on one’s life and morality. Now deep into its story, Fearscape continues to be a comic entirely unafraid of darkness, intent to use its clever pseudo- New Yorker literary fictive voice to unpack the worst sort of artistic impulses.
By Zack Quaintance - In Fearscape #3, writer Ryan O’Sullivan and artist Andrea Mutti’s meta exploration of the darkness inherent to an unsuccessful creative life gets.even darker.
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