Opinion

Eden's Trail

Writer: Chuck Austen
Artist/Creator: Steve Uy
Published by Marvel

In a wasteland region called the Trilands, the only bar for hundreds of miles around is Eden, the pride and joy of its owner, Tila. One day, a mysterious stranger called Latch interrupts a robbery of the bar by a group of bandits, and in an effort to save his own life and Tila's ends up blowing the place up. Tila, furious with him for destroying her livelihood, drags him to her home, where she discovers he is an immortal, a genetically-modified being with great strength who cannot die. With him at her side, she believes she can make an attempt to find a lost treasure, which can help her restore her fortunes.

Well this is something different for Marvel. At last a series with no costumed superheroes to be seen, set in a world entirely removed from the Marvel Universe. On a number of levels, this is entirely different from anything the company has ever produced before, and very impressive package it is too.

Presented in the format Marvel adopted for this year's various X-Men annuals, which it coined Marvelscope, the series is laid-out on landscape, rather than portrait-orientation pages, with the staples on a short side, rather than a long one. This automatically creates a 'widescreen' feeling to to the story, which is absolutely suited to the broad vistas of the Trilands as Steve Uy has visualised them.

On the subject of the visuals, they're stunning. Uy's anime-style illustration creates an identity for Eden's Trail that is different from anything else Marvel are producing, even their Marvel Mangaverse range. The clear difference he creates between foreground and background layers creates a heavily-stylised feeling, and many of the backgrounds are in fact little more than abstract or slightly out-of-focus, creating an even greater sense of the action being throw sharply into relief. One area in which he goes a little too far is the colouring, which frequently fixes on too limited a palette. All of the scenes set in the outdoors on the Trilands for instance are set in shades of yellow, and at times it's not only difficult to distinguish the various elements, it can actually be quite tiring on the eyes.

Although the story if also Uy's, Chuck Austen has been brought in to create the actual script, and he's taken a very spceific, spare approach. Apart from speech bubbles and the odd sound effect, there are no extraneous words; no 'meanwhile', no exposition, no thought bubbles. All of these are left to the pictures to convey, which sometimes works extremely well, and at others falls just short. In the issue one robbery sequence, for instance, there are a couple of points where it's not entirely clear which of the characters is which, or who is aligned with whom - just a little more in the way of guidance would actually have made the scene stronger.

Another thing working against the series is its genre, a mix of sci-fi and western that may not find favour with fans of either, and be too different from the norm to encourage the superhero fans to sample it - a problem which seems to have affected another sci-fi western recently, the TV series Firefly. It's a brave experiment, however, and one that deserve at least to be sampled.