Arclight by Brandon Graham and Marian Churchland

Hi, I’m Jacob Shapiro and I run Fantom Comics in Washington, DC! I was asked to guest curate this page with comics from my personal collection that matter to me. My penultimate post is on Marian Churchland and Brandon Graham’s four-issue miniseries Arclight.

Arclight is a high fantasy in a world full of genderfluid characters and blood-based magic. It deals with concepts of bodies and dysphoria with minimalist dialogue in the vein of Graham’s previous big collaborative project, Prophet. Because it was shortened to a miniseries, Arclight never gets to fully explore the beautiful world it establishes, but it ends up being a very personal small-scale story of identity.

Originally, Arclight was part of a bigger sci-fi/fantasy project by Brandon Graham and Emma Ríos called 8house, a loosely shared universe by a plethora of different artists who could create the books at their own pace in their own voice and style. That concept was a bit too heady for readers and retailers, and the series was cancelled after about a year, but not before giving us Arclight, along with Ríos’ gorgeous watercolor series Mirror that’s still ongoing.

This period a year or two ago at Image Comics represented a high water mark for the publisher, where creators were putting out new experimental work and they seemed unstoppable. This was the perfect bridge between the mainstream comics world and indie small press comics, but alas, the books stopped selling and the series all folded. Since then, unfortunately the company has reverted back to an early-’00s-Vertigo style of grim crime and sci-fi by writers who made their names at Marvel and DC, still pumping out great comics but far fewer books that capture the imagination the way they did in 2015.

Generally these days my favorite comics are art-driven, and I very rarely pick up a book because of the writer. Brandon Graham works so well as a writer because he’s an artist first and foremost, and you can tell when he writes, he’s writing with the artist in mind. No giant blocks of text with exposition, but instead only the necessary dialogue with room for the art to breathe. As I alluded to earlier, it’s less reminiscent of his King City and Multiple Warheads work (aside from the occasional sweet pun) and more reminiscent of Prophet.

Marian Churchland is the real star here. She’s an enigmatic figure in comics, with her two major published complete books being only the graphic novel Beast in 2009 (which is amazing, and 100% worth checking out also)… and then Arclight. She’s run a blog with art updates called Hchom for years, but that’s just ended, and who knows what’s next for her. So we have to savor Arclight.

Churchland’s painted art is meticulous and unique in the comics industry. She takes huge influence from high fantasy video games, especially Dragon Age. She cultivates an androgynous aesthetic that carries through to all her characters in Arclight, the most obvious being the titular character. But along with Sir Arclight is his Lady, a woman searching for her lost human body while inhabiting a wooden form.

Bodies carry over to every aspect of the world, from the violent-but-elegant blood magic to the armor worn by knights, made out of bone. One of my favorite aspects of the book is Churchland’s use of color, from Arclight’s evolving makeup to texture in landscapes, giving the world a graceful, lonely feeling.

You can find Marian on Instagram here, and Brandon is on Tumblr at @royalboiler. I’m on Tumblr at @aleneigen, and Fantom Comics is on Tumblr at @fantomcomics.