“Raised my colors high, these chains I’ve forged; sinking like a stone, sunk to depths”
As I noted a few days ago, Dave Chisholm is having a moment, and his latest work, Spectrum, shows why, as it’s a dazzling piece of work. 
Spectrum is written by Rick Quinn, edited by James B. Emmett, and published by Mad Cave, this hardcover is $39.99, and it’s 139 pages long.
Aubrey Sitterson writes in the foreword how great Spectrum is, and that the future of comics is in books like Spectrum, ones that “truly engage with the medium, that aren’t content to ape film and television, that endeavor to create something deserving and rewarding rumination.” Phew, that’s a mouthful. I’m not quite as high on the comic’s uniqueness as Sitterson is, even though I agree with the sentiment. And Spectrum is an impressive comic book, in that someone trying to adapt it to film would have a tough time of it. It’s almost a masterpiece, and while it has some minor flaws, it’s still excellent.
The biggest problem with the book is the lack of a good antagonist. Fiction doesn’t always need a good antagonist, sure, but Quinn sets it up so that there is a villain, but then doesn’t do enough with him (or them — it’s unclear if they’re any gender, and it seems clear that’s the way Quinn and Chisholm want it) to make them a good one. Echo, as they’re called, shows up to menace our protagonists, but we don’t really know what Echo wants or why they’re motivated to be the villain. It seems like they want to destroy the world, but that’s a banal thing to wish, and we don’t really know if that’s true and why they would want to, anyway. Echo speaks very vaguely about some things, and we think they’re anti-creativity to a degree, but they also speak of the tyranny of the digitization of the world, seemingly disdainful of it. It’s frustrating, because even a villain wanting to end the “infernal fridge buzz of existence,” as Echo mentions late in the book, can be compelling if the creators put the work in. 
Quinn works hard to make our protagonists interesting, but not as much with Echo. Chisholm makes their visuals striking, and Quinn does give them some interesting things to say, but it’s too vague to really work as well as it should.
Quinn gives us two protagonists, Melody Parker and Ada Latimer, whose lives become entwined as so many other things in the book are entwined. The story begins in November 1999, with Melody experiencing the WTO protests in Seattle, although she’s not part of the protest. Echo appears and tries to kill her, and she’s remembering snippets of her life but doesn’t think they’re really her memories. Ada, meanwhile, owns a record store that exists partly because her father, a musician, left behind a vast collection, and after the first issue, Melody shows up in her store and their stories intersect. They need to discover who Echo is, who Melody is, why she and Ada are connected, and what Ada’s super-duper boyfriend has to do with all of this. It becomes a great meditation on art, culture, creativity, and the lengths we go to achieve them and what it costs us. Ada’s father, the musician, is not a good father (Quinn lets him off the hook a bit too much, I think, but I’m probably in the minority), and Ada carries the weight of her father’s mistakes. Melody’s father is also not a good father, although in a different and more malevolent way than Leon Latimer, and she has to overcome more esoteric problems than Ada does. Both of the characters make their journeys, and it’s very impressive how Quinn manages to link them and also give them a lot of depth even inside a labyrinthine plot. 
They both have to confront their fathers, and Quinn does a good job with that.
The book takes place in a slightly alternate Earth than ours — the civil rights leader killed in 1968 is Martha Louise Parks, and Elvis Presley is called “Pervis Tennessee,” for instance — and Quinn takes all these people, events, and moments and links them in weird and wonderful ways that shows how creativity is the apex of human achievement, although Quinn does a nice job questioning whether it’s all worth it. It’s interesting because he doesn’t really answer it, but he puts it in our minds, which allows the reader to consider it themselves. Do Ada and Melody have to go through what they go through in order to become the best version of themselves? What does it really mean to struggle and create and achieve if it costs you something meaningful and important? What do we think of the people who push others to achieve something astonishing, as they are often monstrous? What would turn someone against art itself, and might they have a point? Quinn does a very nice job putting these characters through an action plot (to a degree), but he does a very nice job showing how so many things might be connected and how they turn something disparate into something unified and beautiful.
Chisholm is astonishing, too, and while his work on Plague House, which I reviewed a week ago, was excellent, this is a step up. 
Chisholm moves back and forth through time, nailing the visuals of each time very well, and he shifts from beautiful colors to black-and-white to sepia tones very cleverly. He uses a slightly thinner line for the present, while in the past, he uses a slightly thicker and rougher line. He hatches slightly more in the past, and when he draws moments that aren’t that connected to the main characters, he uses fewer lines to make the images a bit more ethereal. His page designs are superb, as he uses circular panels sprinkled throughout to break up the monotony, full-page and double-page spreads that are either spare yet majestic or packed with beautiful content. His coloring is stunning, as well, with his special effects scarring the world when Echo shows up and a beautifully weird painted section where we get a very vague origin of our protagonist. There is a lot going on in the art, and it’s too much to even get into here, but it’s really astonishing.
Spectrum is a very thoughtful, gorgeous comic that gets into your head and makes you wonder about a lot of different things. It’s also a very nifty and twisty mystery that links back on itself really well, and while I don’t love the bad guy that much, visually, the villain is pretty keen. Other than that, though, it’s a really cool comic. Give it a look!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
