The Gull Yettin

Opening on a young boy’s idyll of happy home life before taking a sharp turn into tragedy, followed by a journey into the unknown, this dark wordless fairy tale from Kessler (Windowpane) makes a perfect if ineffable kind of sense. Watched from afar by a curious, loose-limbed, and vaguely humanoid gull, the boy barely survives a raging fire that destroys his home and seems to kill his parents. The boy is then spirited by the gull from his hospital bed and the two embark on a strange voyage. A woman who believes the gull to be a monster rather than a guardian tries to kill him and takes the boy into her home. Saddened to be separated from the boy, the gull—which shape-shifts into a grotesquely lumpy leafy tree and other forms, its transfigurations often yanked by storming emotions, like a trickster god of folktale—plots revenge. Events don’t follow neatly proscribed dramatic or moral arcs, with random acts of kindness nearly equaled by jolts of cutting cruelty. The blocky and primary color art, which recalls Dash Shaw and Gary Panter, helps give the loose-framed hero’s journey an emotional tug, rendering the fire with a blasting fury that singes the page at one point, and at others amplifying the characters’ loneliness by smothering them in darkness. Transcendent and eerie, this story of the ties that bind exerts a primal force. (May)