Bluebell - Dark Cosmic Fantasy

Bluebell is a 7 issue comic series set on a distant moon. The story follows a series of mysterious disappearances and killings that take place on the only remaining continent on the moon’s melting surface. Each issue introduces new characters, but there is one focal character that is consistent throughout. I’m not really sure what genre it falls into, but I’m going to say that ‘dark cosmic fantasy’ is probably the closest descriptor in that regard. There are elements of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

I’m very fond of gothic horror and its variants. I consider cosmic horror to be an extension of southern gothic horror and classical European gothic horror, and I think it has a lot in common with Canadian wilderness gothic as well. I’ve tried to work a lot in from these literary traditions for how I tell my story of Bluebell. I also want to incorporate a significant level of body horror. I’m infatuated with body horror masters like David Cronenberg and Junji Ito, and I take a lot of inspiration from their work. And of course, like any proper nerd, I love fantasy and science fiction. The way I incorporate fantasy and science fiction allows a lot of space for metaphor and symbolism in my storytelling. (It also lets me create a world of nudists without me needing to waste time and effort contextualizing the nudity.)

I’ve always really loved comics. I grew up using them heavily as reference for my drawing. When I was really little I loved Elf Quest and X-Men, and then as a preteen I discovered Alan Moore’s politically driven work, in my late teens and early adulthood I read Maus and Persepolis and got into more literary graphic novels. I did a number of research projects on comics in university as well. It’s a very fascinating format. There are such a wide variation of very complex literary effects when you combine words and images in different ways. I really want to experiment and see how far I can push the comic format. I’ve done a lot of work to plan out different ways to contain my story in this format and ways to play with how the reader experiences time in parallel with the characters the story is being told through. I think there are significant challenges when it comes to translating folkoric storytelling to print, particularly because of the ways we have come to conceive of storytelling as primarily one of consumption, entertainment, and simple mirrored representations, rather than something deeply thought-provoking and philosophical in the literary sense. I am increasingly interested in comics and videogames as a means of overcoming the assault on literacy that’s coming from every direction today, specifically because of their format. The combinations of text and visual art that are possible with comics and video games, I think, are effective in circumventing the barriers our text-laden consumption-driven cultures have forced up that block us from genuine and meaningful literary affect. I’m trying to evoke an experience of time and place and perspective that is more in line with what Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein did in their work, and I think comics are the perfect avenue for that.

Bluebell is a radical retelling of Bluebeard, a fairy tale that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a child. I used to like writing short stories a lot and I’d written different versions of Bluebeard several times. At one point I had started putting together a concept for a comic (quite different from Bluebell, but I’ve adapted some of the plot points for Bluebell). I was even using Bluebeard as the central story being closely analyzed for my masters thesis on folklore (I never finished though) .

The standard version of Bluebeard was written in 1697 by a rich guy named Charles Perrault who had collected it from the French countryside. His version has a family send their daughter off to marry a wealthy nobleman whose wives keep mysteriously vanishing. After their wedding night, the newly married nobleman must leave for several days on business and he leaves his young wife with the keys to every door on his expansive estate. He warns her, however, to never enter one room in particular. This room is strictly OFF LIMITS! While he’s away, the woman predictably succumbs to the temptations of the forbidden door. She unlocks the door and opens it to find it had been concealing a torture dungeon containing the remains of the nobleman’s previous wives. She panics and drops the key in the pool of blood that covers the floor before closing the door and relocking it. The terrified woman tries to hide the evidence of her indiscretion but the blood will not come off of the key. So when the nobleman returns and takes back his keys, he sees the blood, knows that she disobeyed him and broke his trust, and he totally loses his shit and chases his young wife with the intent of making her his next victim. She runs to the top of the building and screams for her brothers who make it in time to defeat Bluebeard, putting the lavish estate in the hands of Bluebeard’s widow.

Bluebeard has been retold many many times by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut (Bluebeard), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre) and Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea), Nalo Hopkinson (The Glass Bottle Trick), Margaret Atwood (Bluebeard’s Egg), and the list really just goes on and on. My contribution to retelling this story is to take what I would describe as a Marxist-Freudian folklorist approach. I have read Herbert Marcuse’s major work on Freud, Eros and Civilization, maybe like 573 times and it’s probably rotted my brains, but I just think it’s so brilliant, and I think it’s a very valuable perspective to apply to a story that is essentially a cultural artifact. Like I said, my version is a radical retelling, so it’s not going to be very recognizable in comparison to Perrault’s version. I’m working with the themes of love and violence, and I’m concerned with exploring how the world we live in shapes people and our potential for love.

My version of Bluebeard is situated in a dying environment. Bluebell takes place on a melting winter-y continent on one of three moons orbiting a poisoned and presumably uninhabitable planet. There are multiple sentient species on the continent that co-exist in different ways, with one far-reaching ruling structure that attempts to enforce submission to their religious rule. There are giants, blood magic, sex cults, a wind religion for historians, soft cannibal warriors, and a lot of nudity, all within a world that revolves around dreams.

There are an intense number of world building elements going into this and I’ll be posting all about it in a series of blogs as I continue to develop my comic series. Please come back regularly as I continue to create a new fantasy world for Bluebell.

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