Review time! with ‘Adherent’

“I wanna feel sunlight on my face, I see that dust cloud disappear without a trace”

My latest review is of Adherent, which is by Chris W. Kim and is published by Conundrum Press. Join me in checking this out, won’t you?

Adherent is a difficult book to write about, because so little happens. I mean, really. In this book, a woman named Em, who lives in a small community out in the forest that lives by scavenging the surrounding area, gets her hands on a journal written some time before by a woman who lived in a shack deep in the woods and wrote down her observations about the world around her. Em decides to leave her community and find the woman, because the journal fascinates her. Eventually, she does find the woman and has a chat with her. That’s … basically it. So there’s not much in the way of plot to write about, but on the other hand, diving too deep into the thematic underpinnings of the book risks ruining it for you, the good reader. I mean, there’s a lot going on in Em’s head (despite Kim remaining a detached narrator – we don’t get Em’s thought balloons telling us all sorts of things), but that’s something for each reader to puzzle out as they read, because you might think something different than I do, mightn’t you?

Y’see, Em lives in a vaguely-defined post-apocalyptic world, it seems, with extremely isolated communities that don’t appear to have any modern amenities (electricity, for instance) but clearly have some knowledge of modern things. They scavenge things from the “old world” but don’t seem to be creating new things, and this appears to frustrate Em, which is why she embarks on her quest (again, this is just my interpretation – maybe she’s just bored). As she walks, she finds other communities, also isolated, but growing increasingly larger and slightly more sophisticated until she finds the woman in a city that is more populated than anything she’s come across but is still isolated and proto-modern. She meets some people along the way, and everyone is more or less nice to her (even the dude who tells her to scram from the gate of one town isn’t terribly rude about it), and she keeps coming across detritus from the old world, and she has a long discussion with the woman about the notebooks and what they mean to the woman and to Em and what happens now, and then … well, the book ends, but I’m not going to tell you how, because you might want to find out for yourself! Em has to consider what she wants from the world and what she wants for her own life and how far she’s willing to go to find it. The book is about community, and what that means, and where you find a community, and whether that community is good for you or not, and how you break away from that community. The nice thing about the book is that Kim doesn’t really give us any answers – the questions are there, and Em makes a choice, but we have no idea whether it’s a good one or not. But it is a choice, and she has to live with it, as do we in our own lives.

While there’s not terribly much to the plot (which, of course, is fine), Kim’s intricate art brings this odd world to life beautifully. Em’s original village is deep in the woods, and Kim gives us buildings made of sticks and thatch, a place so rudimentary that the woman’s hut, which is made of slabs of sheet metal cobbled together, can be described as “well built.” Em and her people are very much part of the natural world, and the trees and leaves are beautiful but a bit overwhelming, which might be one reason why Em decides to leave. Kim uses many wordless panels to show the rhythm of life in the woods, a very natural, placid kind of life, but one on the edge, as the people need to scavenge to survive. As Em moves through the forest, she begins to see better constructed villages, until she leaves the forest and enters a desert and finds walled towns made of brick and adobe. Kim does a nice job showing how the world changes just by how humans organize themselves – as the cities get bigger, Em finds more trash that her tribe would find use for, and she also finds more collected knowledge, so she’s unsure how to proceed. Kim doesn’t make a big deal about the dichotomy in the text, as the art shows us the differences between the people living closer to nature but also closer to sudden death as opposed to the people who are more organized and, presumably, safer, but possibly less soulful as well. It’s a well done way to highlight the age-old clash between nature and civilization, and because it’s all done through the artwork, it’s not obnoxiously obvious. Kim has a very thin, almost jittery line (he uses chunky blacks well, but not too often), which helps give the impression of a world that is still experiencing decay as opposed to the riot of lines in the forest, which looks a bit more natural. It’s quiet art like the script is quiet, but it works very well in the book.

Adherent is meditative, so say the least. It’s an interesting book about people and what they do and how they live. It will probably not blow your socks off, because it’s not that kind of book. But is it your kind of book? That, indeed is the question!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆