ESSENTIALS VOL. 1

Arnold and Wyatt’s graphic novel collection follows an unlikely hero trying to save the world.

As the story opens, a young woman named Jenn, her husband, and their young daughter, Maize, are struggling to live a semblance of a normal life in a world overrun by shambling zombies when they get a shock: A gun-wielding stranger appears out of nowhere and reveals that Jenn’s husband is actually an amorphous evil demon, which utters dire warnings before vanishing. The stranger is Harris Pax, a man from an alternate reality in which he’s tried to warn the population that underlying scientific realities have changed. “Reality has become untethered,” he told a TV audience that clearly considered him insane. “If we can’t realign it with the fundamental principles of science, it will no longer support our existence!” Pax built himself a bunker to shelter against this change, where he was visited by very strange emissaries: three children’s toys, now inhabited by extra-dimensional beings whose superior reality is merging with Pax’s and absorbing the essence of every person in it. One of these toys (called Buttons) now joins him on his quest through all of the various splinter realities cropping up everywhere. With the help of Jenn and Maize, Pax and Buttons set about trying to save the few remaining human survivors of their world and restore objective reality—or at least determine whether it still exists at all—while contending with other-dimensional beings eager to consume everything.

Arnold and Wyatt have skillfully managed the considerable feat of forging a narrative set in a surreal fantasy landscape that’s not only comprehensible, but compelling. The anchor of the story is Harris Pax, who’s convincingly portrayed as a combination of dorky egotism and yearning idealism. Equally engaging is the depiction of Buttons, who becomes drunk on physical sensations when she inhabits a human body, adding an intriguing wrinkle to the book’s reality-is-what-you-make-it subtext. The story’s most arresting character arc is that of Jenn, whose seemingly easy adaptation to her own splinter reality hides a much darker pain. Half a dozen artists render each chapter; their subtly different visual styles, which might have registered as discordant in a more linear story, effectively emphasize the constantly shifting realities at the heart of the work. These alternate realities, maintained by the personal traumas or obsessions of the individual people at their centers, vary wildly; the zombie-haunted suburbia of the opening is but one example. The sense of lurking dread that runs throughout Pax’s adventures and the real feeling of grand stakes are consistently maintained, though the fragmentary nature of the narrative necessarily results in a somewhat bumpy reading experience. Because this volume ends on a cliffhanger, readers won’t get any broad plot satisfaction here—on the final page, Pax’s mission seems poised to unravel completely. But the book has so many well-orchestrated dramatic beats that readers will be pulled relentlessly along from one crisis to the next, dazzled by the hyperkinetic art styles that fill each chapter. The book’s deeper considerations about the very nature of reality (and what each of us makes of it) are fascinating.

A lively and richly entertaining adventure into alternate realities.