{"id":4815,"date":"2010-05-02T15:27:06","date_gmt":"2010-05-02T20:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=4815"},"modified":"2010-07-22T22:44:42","modified_gmt":"2010-07-23T03:44:42","slug":"stephens-joshua-ray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=4815","title":{"rendered":"Stephens, Joshua Ray – The Moth or the Flame"},"content":{"rendered":"

Website<\/a><\/p>\n

\"themoth1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Moth or the Flame<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you prefer your comics simple, I’ll warn you right now to move along.\u00c2\u00a0 If you, on the other hand, prefer to have to puzzle out your comics, knowing that you’ll still have questions at the end but that you will be richly visually rewarded for your troubles, this is worth a close look.\u00c2\u00a0 Joshua has an excellent introduction along those lines, essentially saying that the pretty pictures would probably be enough for some readers, but those who demand more would be richly rewarded.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the tale, more or less, of two lovers and how they eventually destroy each other.\u00c2\u00a0 A rich and successful playboy meets an ambitious lawyer at a party, they end up back at his place, but she disappears while he’s on a hunting expedition the next day.\u00c2\u00a0 And really, I can’t just leave it at “a hunting expedition”.\u00c2\u00a0 The playboy, Tempest McGillicutty (who looks like vaguely like Too Much Coffee Man, in the sense that he has what appears to be an opening with liquid at the top of his head) goes out with his hunting dog, which is wearing the skin of a sheep.\u00c2\u00a0 Tempest shoots an adorable creature who is frolicking by the water to lure an even bigger creature to eat the remains, which will let him suck the energy from this larger creature.\u00c2\u00a0 This whole sequence is bizarre enough to be an unsettling comic all by itself.\u00c2\u00a0 He returns to his house, finds his lover Tealeaf Wallowrose gone, and goes into a long funk.\u00c2\u00a0 He eventually learns that she had been called away on a project but couldn’t stop talking about him, they are reunited and spend two blissful years together.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, such a thing rarely lasts, odd happenings occur, a rite is required, and their love it turned into something much uglier.\u00c2\u00a0 Reading over this, it almost seems like a fairly common story, which does the whole graphic novel a disservice.\u00c2\u00a0 This is an utterly unique comics experience, with things hinted at going on below the surface that one read through will only begin to discover.\u00c2\u00a0 Every page is drawn and planned out seemingly to perfection, the troubles at the end seem to be inevitable in hindsight, and there’s so much happening on every level that you could practically pick your own moral lesson, if you need one of those.\u00c2\u00a0 This seems to be Joshua’s first comic (although there must be some minis out there, as this is a self-published hardcover graphic novel), and it’s things like this that keep the medium going strong.\u00c2\u00a0 Somebody will read this, get their own ideas, make their own utterly bizarre and unique comic, and the art form moves right along.\u00c2\u00a0 Why don’t you check it out and help that process?\u00c2\u00a0 $18<\/p>\n

\"themoth2\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Website The Moth or the Flame If you prefer your comics simple, I’ll warn you right now to move along.\u00c2\u00a0 If you, on the other hand, prefer to have to puzzle out your comics, knowing that you’ll still have questions at the end but that you will be richly visually rewarded for your troubles, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3957,2125],"class_list":["post-4815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-joshua-ray-stephens","tag-the-moth-or-the-flame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4815"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16494,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4815\/revisions\/16494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}