Graphic Novel Review: First Moon by Jason McNamara and Tony Talbert

Ben, the young hero of Jason McNamara and Tony Talbert's First Moon (AiT/Planet Lar), is a Boy with A Problem – the nature of which the savvy reader will quickly deduce based on the book's title and the picture of a wolf's gaping maw on the cover. Like the teenaged heroine of McNamara & Talbert's debut graphic novel, Continuity, Ben is adolescently chafing against his Berkeley parents (who happen – horrors! – to both be English teachers), but when he surprises them in an unguarded moment, the true sight of his parents is enough to send him running away from home. Scripter McNamara holds off the specifics of that particular reveal to the end of the book, but we're pretty sure it's something lycanthropic: especially after we've been treated to a dinner table sequence where Ben's parents tease him for being vegetarian.

First Moon's big storytelling conceit is to link this tale of family ties and adolescent change to a moment from America's early days: the story of the Roanoke, Virginia, colony that mysteriously vanished in the 1600s, leaving the word "Croatoan" carved into a post as its final epitaph. The Croatoan mystery has – like the story of the Marie Celeste – served as a source for dark fictions in the past (perhaps, most memorably, in a Harlan Ellison short story), though here the creative team's treatment of the material is appealingly moody. Opening and then flashing back regularly to the Roanoke colony, represented by two of its more arrogantly racist leaders, Dare and Cooper, we're shown how the entire colony is cursed and cut off from our plane of existence after they capture and torture the member of a mysterious tribe known as the Mandoag.

Runaway Ben, of course, winds up getting closer and closer to the Roanoke settlers, who when we finally meet them turn out to be more knowledgeable about our world than you'd expect a bunch of cursed shutaways to be. (One of 'em makes a reference to cell phones.) Unlike the dystopian s-f story, Continuity, Ben's coming-of-age doesn't end grimly for all concerned, though there's plenty of room left for a darker follow-up, if the creators are so inclined.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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