Art: Greg Hinkle
Colors: Matt Wilson, Dee Cuniffe
Letters: Aditya Bidikar
Design: Tom Muller
“I’m from a place of stories, so big that they defined everything. People so committed to their stories they choose to live in them” intones Zelda, the main protagonist of Black Cloud. “We tell these stories to ourselves... To keep on going.” Zelda is a grifter out to con simple minded rubes with snake oil. She’s part of a long American tradition of hucksters, cheats, and entrepreneurs selling people on a dream of an illusory better world. But creators Ivan Brandon and Jason Latour subvert the conventional trope of a craven villain manipulating honest working folk to part with their meager savings. Zelda is a young black woman, and the rubes she tricks are self-absorbed, rich millennials looking for a relief from their ennui. Zelda isn’t even an Earth native, but an exile from a supernatural realm. She’s probably violating her exile and not a few laws by selling limited access to this realm, without fully informing her clients about the dangers they’ll be exposing themselves to. The comic conveys the experience as something like a drug-induced high, only with much more lethal side effects.
The setup affords Greg Hinkle and Matt Wilson to engage is a number of virtuosic turns. The comic begins with a sepia-colored prehistoric world populated by cave dwellers haunted by giant batlike monsters. But after an awesome display of magical power, the scene quickly shifts to the gleaming spires of a modern metropolis, the neon blue and red lighting of the streets below, and finally to the monochromatic hues of Zelda’s dream world, punctuated by bursts of random technicolor. These shifts from the mundane to the virtual/fantastic recall any number of films from The Matrix to Inception. And the dream world itself possesses an early 20th century milieu vaguely reminiscent of J.K. Rowling’s magical world found in the New York of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
But that’s also sort of the problem. While visually accomplished, I’m not really sold on whether Zelda’s world is a place where rich young people would want to slum around when trying to relieve their boredom. The place feels more generically terrifying than uniquely exhilarating. And while Zelda spins some great lines convincing them of her realm’s attractions, her 1st person narration throughout the comic can get a little ponderous after a bit. It doesn’t help that it also gets in the way of Hinkle’s more whimsical art.
For all her monologuing, Zelda remains at this point a mysterious character. Her motives don’t seem particularly nefarious, but she’s very cavalier with the safety of her customers. She’s a hero who’s experienced some hard luck, and has decided to survive in this alien world by exploiting the native one percenters. It’s a slight twist to an old tale, but does it truly do enough to turn the tables on them?
