Chris Wright’s Blacklung is unquestionably one of the most impressive
graphic novel debuts in recent years, a sweeping, magisterially conceived,
visually startling tale of violence, amorality, fortitude, and redemption, one
part Melville, one part Peckinpah. Blacklung is a story that lives up to the
term graphic novel, that could only exist in sequential pictures — densely
textured, highly stylized, delicately and boldly rendered drawings that is,
taken together, wholly original. In a night of piratical treachery when an
arrogant school teacher is accidentally shanghaied aboard the frigate Hand, his
fate becomes inextricably fettered to that of a sardonic gangster. Dependent on
one another for survival in their strange and dangerous new home, the two form
an unlikely alliance as they alternately elude or confront the thieves and
cutthroats that bad luck has made their companions and captors. After an act of
terrible violence, the teacher is brought before the ship’s captain and
instructed to use his literary skills to aid him in writing his memoirs. He is
to serve as scribe for a man who, in his remaining years, has made it his
mission to commit as many acts of evil as possible in order to ensure that he
meet his dead wife in hell. As the captain’s protected confidant, finding
his only comfort in the few books afforded him, the teacher bears witness to
monstrous brutality, relentless cruelty, strange wisdom, and a journey of
redemption through loss of faith.
In this graphic novel cartooned by a promising up-and-comer, a schoolteacher and a gangster team up when pirates shanghai them.
