Anomaly
Skip Brittenham (W) and Brian Haberlin (A)
Anomaly Publishing, 370pp, £45.00
My best friend called me at 11pm the other night, raving about a giant book he’d just bought called Anomaly.
“It’s massive!” he hissed, before confiding that he was on his way to my place. He had a flight the next day, and on the strength of just 17 pages had decided to buy the tablet edition of this book for the trip and lend me the original.
Intrigued, I jumped online to see what the world had to say about it. The reviews on Amazon maintained my friend’s fervour, reading like the euphoric whispers of cultists:
“undoubtedly the best graphic novel of 2012”
“a must have for any comic book collector!”
“every moment was joyous”
“The Future of Books NOW!!!!!”
When it arrived, it was exactly as large as everyone had said: a hulking 368-page gravestone of a book, in a case splashed with endorsements from the likes of Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott. These too hyped Anomaly as if it represented not just a really great comic, but a whole new form of artistic expression for mankind.
Willing to believe, I opened and gawped at vista after astonishing vista, from monolithic starships in low orbit to flights of doves in the midground of colossal vertical cities. The sense of wonder persisted for around the first tenth of the book, and even though clichés were clustering at the edge of reason, I kept my disbelief aloft and convinced myself it was all just the sort of high camp that accomplished space opera can get away with.
Fifty pages later however, at around the point my friend texted me to say “I can’t believe I bought this”, I had to admit to myself I was simply reading a crap book.
The spectacle of it all was the false plywood front of a movie-set edifice, concealing a disappointing mess of tired old junk: evil supercorporations, chosen ones, noble savages, dark lords and armies of orcs (Yes, armies of orcs – very early in the story, the sudden narrative deployment of technology-eating nanobollocks provides an excuse for things to lurch from sci-fi into a sort of bargain-bin Lord of the Rings).
Brian Haberlin and Gierrod Van Dyke’s art, comprising digital painting over wireframe models, stopped feeling impressive, and became faintly unnerving, when applied in close-up to human faces rather than massive spacecraft.
Even the “augmented reality” app released with the book couldn’t redeem it, allowing only the ability to point my phone at larger images and have ropey 3D models lean out of the page to bark at me.
Anomaly, I decided, was certainly accurately titled: how could so much money be thrown at this (it’s frequently called “the most expensive graphic novel ever produced”), only for the end result to be so flaccid?
The answer may lie with Anomaly co-writer and co-creator Skip Brittenham – one of Hollywood’s biggest lawyers, and a man who has represented Eddie Murphy, Bruce Willis and, oh, Harrison Ford. With that in mind, the grinning endorsements on the back of the case, the movie-style “Biggest Graphic Novel Ever” billing, and the online hype machine, all make a lot more sense.
Sadly, despite reputedly having embarked on the Anomaly project after having been challenged to take on a creative endeavour by his wife, Brittenham has managed to produce something that, despite its sheer physical presence, is resolutely uncreative.
Rather, it’s a compilation of the most marketable elements of big-budget SF/fantasy cinema, sewn together into a groaning, digitally painted Frankenstein and shoved out into the comics market. Avatar, Prometheus, 300, Lord of the Rings, Halo, John Carter and pretty much every expensive genre film of the last decade all shine murkily through every page.
Was Brittenham hoping to create a a massive fanbase ex nihilo, by drawing together as many elements as possible from established franchises? While this may be a great strategy for designing summer blockbusters, I doubt its longevity in the comics market.
I see sci-fi comics as a place where people can do things far too left-field and weird for Hollywood; where big ideas aren’t tied to big budgets, and so don’t need to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to ensure a return on investment.
From the reckless deployment of a bowel disruptor in Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan (yes, it does exactly what you think it does), to the hijacking of a city-sized cyborg space-whale in Alexandro Jodorowsky & Juan Giménez’s Metabarons, scifi comics are a place for vast and mad things to happen with no regard to demographic appeal. While Anomaly may be epic in size, epic in its endorsements, epic in its marketing budget and in its app tie-ins, it is absolutely diminuitive in terms of its contribution to genre fiction. But it is, I will stress once more, a very large book.
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