Fish+ Chocolate
Kate Brown
SelfMadeHero, 128pp, £14.99
Fish + Chocolate is unsettling. Part of the reason I feel that way might be the route I have taken through the work of Kate Brown, the creator of this collection of three short stories. The majority of Brown’s work to date has been for the all-ages comics the DFC and its spiritual successor the Phoenix, where she created adventure stories with a slightly darker twist than most work for children. Spider Moon, serialised in the DFC Weekly, was cruelly cut short by the cancellation of its parent title, and only reached the end of the first of an intended five-volume run, but the Lost Boy, about a shipwrecked young boy and his lemur, launched with more achievable aims, and finished its 35 episode run last August. (Owing to the impressive tautness of the Phoenix, those 35 episodes only amount to 70 pages)
The Lost Boy was one of the slower stories in the first six months of the Phoenix, taking too long to subvert the boy-goes-on-treasure-hunt plot with the menace of the islands other inhabitants. Those shadowy figures would become the focus of the story, but I fear by the time Brown played her hand, the immediate thrill of Daniel Hartwell and Neill Cameron’s Pirates of Pangaea may have proved more seductive. (The latter also had pirates and dinosaurs, basically rendering it eight-year-old kryptonite)
What the Lost Boy really had going for it, though, was Brown’s art. Expressive characters — well, character — and beautiful foliage (it’s a niche talent, but it’s a talent nonetheless) combined with her keen understanding of the ability of the palette of a work to set the mood to instantly evoke the tropical paradise her hero was stuck on. That’s an important skill, given the constrained space she had to work in.
In Fish + Chocolate, we get to see Brown in the exact opposite mode. Where Spider Moon was for all ages, the three short stories contained here are emphatically adult in tone, and one is fairly explicit to boot. And where the Lost Boy was compressed down into just two pages an episode, these are decompressed, allowing her art and characters room to breath.
The best of the shorts is the opening one, “the Piper Man”. It’s a loose retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, set in the modern day with a single mum and her two kids. We all know the ending of the fable; but we also all know the stereotype of the creepy weirdo who plays with other people’s children. It’s a stereotype that many—including the mother in the story—aren’t quite comfortable with, but who’s going to be the one to let their principles get in the way of their children’s safety? And so the conflict isn’t just between the mother and her kids. It’s also an internal one, as she tries to summon up the courage to keep the piper man away for good.
“The Cherry Tree” doesn’t wear its plot on its sleeve in the same way. It still concerns the relationship of a mother and her child (as do all three stories in the book) and in the end, tragedy ensues all the same. But the menace here is entirely conveyed through tone and setting. Prisca and her mother have moved into a new house with a cherry tree in the garden, which, both passively and actively, enters the daughter’s live. But Prisca is left to her own devices, and the negligence takes its toll.
Both Cherry Tree and Piper Man also use the same mastery of colouring that Brown demonstrated in Lost Boy to great effect. As the stories go on, and menace creeps in, the colour slowly drains from the palette. The difference, when you look back and forth, is stark; but you barely notice it when reading through. The similarities also demonstrate attention to the placing of the two stories in the book. In Piper Man, the menace is explicit, and the desaturation serves to emphasise that, but by Cherry Tree, the same effect is already mentally associated with menace. The pages thus unsettle, without any good reason why. Until the end of that story, that is. That pattern is subverted in the final story, Matroyshka, which begins desaturated after tragedy has already occurred. It’s a gut-wrenching depiction of mental illness, but ultimately a hopeful one as well.
Fish + Chocolate is the work of a phenomenally talented author. Were it not frequently wordless, it would be called “literary”; were they not telling stories, the images alone would be art. Instead, it’s just damn good comics.
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