Review: The Autumnlands, Vol. 2: Woodland Creatures

The Autumnlands, Vol. 2: Woodland Creatures by Kurt Busiek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wasn’t that big a fan of volume of Autumnlands. The illustrations grabbed me, but the story was confusing and ‘epic,’ – epic in the sense that it wasn’t in any hurry to get where it implied it was going. I certainly didn’t plan to pick up the sequel, but volume one was on the shelf, and I kept picking it up. Something about Benjamin Dewey’s art kept calling me back. So, gradually, I got to wondering what happened next.

Well, I think it gets better. I have admired Kurt Busiek for a long time from his Astro City work. The idea there was to try to recover a sense of the wonder that a superhero first engendered, the largely innocent promise that a caped crusader would be there to fight on behalf of ideals that we can assume the others around us share. That work was largely homage, but it was also celebration. It looked backwards, but it tried to weave a changed sense of gender stereotypes and a more generous inclusiveness into that past vision.

It turns out Busiek is doing a lot of the same things here. At bottom, this book tries to reinstill wonder. It is bewildering, especially at first in volume one, but, as it settles into a narrative with clearer terms and clearer challenges at stake, it accomplishes that goal all the more consistently. This is a world of talking animals, represented most fully in this volume by Dusty, a dog and aspiring young wizard. He and the Great Champion, a hero recalled by backfiring magic in volume one, are exploring the Autumnlands, the mostly uncivilized space below the magnificent floating cities of the wizards and the animal elite. Here they begin to discover the headwaters of the stream of magic that, powering the world, is beginning to run low.

I feel silly typing those sentences, but the fact that I typed them anyway gives a sense of the peculiar power of this story. It wouldn’t work at all without taking itself and its premises seriously, but it would be insufferable if it took them too seriously. This isn’t philosophy, but it isn’t aimless either. It’s a sustained effort to make it possible to be surprised at what artists can do. That would be purely innocent if it didn’t also give the sense that its vision of different races working together weren’t somehow, in some unnamed fashion, at stake.

And each element of the overall art here complements the rest. Busiek seems to be hitting his stride in the writing of this. Each of the eight separate issues explores some new facet of the world, but then he moves things forward between issues. It’s a good and comforting pace, making this an ideal thing for reading as you’re getting ready to fall asleep.

I actually think Dewey’s art slips a little here – some of the proportions are off, though that may be because he is drawing more human forms here than the animal shapes that dominated volume one – but it’s still arresting. And, while I don’t usually notice such things, Jordie Bellaire’s coloring touches it off in a way that – even as I have just finished it – has me reaching to look over random pages.

Oddly, the real star for me is the lettering, credited to John Roshell and Jimmy Betancourt, both of something called Comicraft. I don’t know how to say it other than that these words almost demand that you read them. The letters feel like part of the art.

Again, the full effect of those different people working together is that there really is something wondrous in the work. It’s a largely silly story with premises that change here and there, but it has the feel of the escapist comics of some golden age. At the same time, in subtle ways I can’t always put a finger on, it reminds us that we aren’t in a golden age any more, that it takes an effort today – as adults at this moment – to see the world the way a child might. I admire the ambition, and I admire the execution.


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