Ben Sears does a biff bam pow with Young Shadow: Tunnel Vision

The cartoonist explores the expanses of hero comics.

Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore, and you should read. The latest: Young Shadow: Tunnel Vision by Ben Sears, available now.

This was a comic made for me. Love at first sight, as is often the case with Ben Sears’ work. Sears is an illustrator and graphic designer as well as a cartoonist. Inside: a kid vigilante punching a cop in the face; a subterranean maze of open passageways and tiered canals; taking the dog for a walk. What you want from a hero story — certainly what I want. Sears pulls from a variety of interests and strengths to create Young Shadow: Tunnel Vision. It sews together a story that seems simple, but hangs on a greater timing and wit disguised as coincidence. A garden-path sentence that comes back around to itself? Yes.

So let’s call it bespoke. A synthesis of many comics, many decades of comics, reimagined rather than reinterpreted. With a hero comic — and all those decades — it’s hard, if not impossible, to escape your new story being in conversation with all the stories that have come before. A problem that the law can’t touch manifests, a boy in a mask is driven to act, biff bam pow, resolution. I’m doing it right now.

Yet Sears has created something unique with Tunnel Vision. Not by rewriting the archetype with Young Shadow, but through drawing on a multidisciplinary array of conventions that contribute to good comics, using the stuff he loves to tell the best story he can.

Consider Ben Sears, the illustrator. A storyteller in the company of Bruegel the Elder and Graeme Base. Through multiple exposure, or sometimes alone in a great expanse, a still image conveys the idea of exploration. Sears revels in environments whose architecture invites the imagination to tell a story about how the characters travel through it, whether they are shown it happening or not — the place as a character.

Sears’ character design is distinct, hard to pin down to a single source or style. And what makes Young Shadow’s armor look cool is treated with the same claymation sculpt density in its drawing as the kid in the ball cap he’s helping out, and the chunk of a dog (with a cute underbite) he’s walking. Same with his Henson-esque penchant for drawing creatures and putting them everywhere. The pages beg to be searched, and the cartoon eyeballs in the dark peering back at you have nothing to do with the plot.

The first thing that got me, really, was the texture of the drawings. Noise that you can touch and feel with your eyes. Tunnel Vision has a softness, like the TV antenna isn’t quite picking it up. Instantly reminded of Andrew MacLean’s Snarlagon, stippled to the degree that it achieves the same distal tactility, without sacrificing the delicate flatness of the line art.

The texture is tape hiss that Sears creates to fill in negative space and make his cartoony linework contours more visually concrete. But neither cassette fidelity nor rabbit ears quite nail how the noise never gets in the way of the melody, sitting behind the drawing, an effective alternative coloring technique. The balance is clear imagery that feels dreamy.

That’s what Young Shadow is all about. Take the titular tunnels. They are surreal in concept as well as stylization. City on top is crowded, old-new in a Disney cartoon way; modern. Beneath — close enough to lose a baseball in it, if it goes down the right drain — a stone irrigation system like out of the Super Mario 64 sand land level. Neatly stacked massive ancient blocks. If his prints didn’t already make it clear, Sears loves drawing involved environments, fantasy mazes of undated age, just as much as the little dudes that inhabit them.

What it feels like is a Carl Barks duck book, a Golden Age comics adventure. Domino mask and bare knuckle brawls. Ancient catacombs from an earlier epoch. Very BD. There’s a perfectly good reason that two kids, admittedly one a superhero, are on the stone stairs beneath the sewers! They’re not just taking the dog for a walk. Well, he was: Young Shadow, who was helping out at the animal shelter that was recently robbed, bumps into a friend while walking one of the shelter’s dogs. This kid just lost an autographed baseball down a sewer grate. Chasing the lost ball through forgotten aqueducts, they come across a hideout, missing money, thieves.

The story comes quietly back around to itself. Young Shadow is a superhero after all, and if it’s a fight “the phantom burglar” is looking for, that’s what he’ll get. Tunnel Vision is a genre-shifting attempt to tell a bunch of different stories as one narrative. And it works. The reader moves from style to style, idea to idea, so that the inevitable remains surprising. The story shines with the affection Sears has for the act of telling.

Young Shadow: Tunnel Vision is available now. To snag a copy, click this.

Plus World / $8
Written and illustrated by Ben Sears.