A panelled prose comic
A magician prince from a far-flung galactic empire wakes up inside a Catholic church’s reliquary with only the fading memory of being on the verge of winning a long and bloody war for the throne. Without his army, weapons, or even flesh on his bones, this callous warlord finds himself surrounded by a devout congregation and surprised priests who thought his withered body belonged to St. Giles the Healer. What is left of his memory barely holds intact long enough to help him escape. But where on Earth can a skeleton hide?
Bones of the Magus: All That remains is a hybrid science fiction story formatted as a comic book. It is a graphic-less graphic novel—meaning that even though it’s completely prose, it’s laid out in panels that are discreet moments of time. Every panel moves you further along in the story allowing your mind to form its own vivid pictures of the scene, the characters, and the action that takes place. Typographic art erupts in some places, too, just for fun.
This page is from a point in the story where the reluctant hero has made his way into a Goth club thinking they were something else entirely. He encounters a large number of partiers and a would-be vampire hunter who is more than a little nuts, but also happens to wield a sword with real power.
The hunter is easily disarmed, but his sword dives down through three floors of the building, seeking ground, but releasing the power of the undead on its way.
Each panel on this page is a floor of the club. Each has its own actions and reactions to the sword as it passes. They are the story the readers follow. The sword itself merely illuminates them.
How the comic works:
Every panel is like a picture composed of words.
It’s not just omniscient narration. The prose in the panel is the image and dialogue I want you to see.
There can be thought bubbles, action, setting detail, speech, and special effects things like emanata (symbols that are shortcuts for emotions, etc) and onomatopia (words that make sounds like ZAP! and KAPOW!)
From that first panel, your eye moves to the next across the gutter between the panels and you reach the next moment in time.
This moves you through the story panel by panel, moment by moment. The pages are laid the same as traditional comics. Every so often I play with typography to bring the images to life, or just to have fun with words as pictures, but not so often that it interferes with the story.
Bones was first published by Broken Jaw Press, a small literary press in Fredericton, NB (they called it avant garde 🙂 ) as a single, graphic-less novel.
Since then, I produced a new, expanded story as a 4 issue, limited series.
Digital copies of the comic are available on Amazon.
Print copies, including the collector’s box set (handmade by the artist) can be found at my table at conventions, or you can reach out to me on social media.
