Romancing The Stone: It cut like a knife, but it felt so right.

 
[What follows contains multiple spoilers for The Sword.]

"Better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all."

You know what I mean. You probably already know that my first official Love Affair with a comic book, after writing these little columns off and on for something like two years, has come to an end. It's not that anything "happened." There's no hard feelings. The relationship ran its course. It's done now. And we are both the better for it. Well, I am, at least. It's a thing.

Throughout one's life, a person has many first loves. You may remember the first sweater you loved, or the first song you loved. I was just thinking about that today. I was working on some lyrics for one of my new children's songs, and I was contemplating whether or not to make it an action based song where I instruct the kids to jump and/or clap and/or wiggle--or if I should make it a story song. Thinking about story songs reminded me that my first very favorite song, when I was really young , was "Billy Don't Be a Hero." It wasn't about jumping, it wasn't about my tricycle. It was a story song. (And sure, it was an anti-war propaganda song. But I didn't know that. Even though it worked on me!) I remember picturing the whole thing in my head. Paying rapt attention every time I heard it. I cried at the end everytime. "I hear his fiancee got a letter/that told how Billy died that day./The letter said that he was a hero/she should be proud he died that way./I heard she threw the letter, awaaaaaaaaaay." (commence whistling.)

My first made-for-TV movie? Well, thank God for google and wikipedia, because just moments ago I thought, "what was that movie called? Lemme google 'girl riding on back of turtle movie." Found it immediately. "The Bermuda Depths!!!" You gotta read this or watch this or listen to THIS, to know what I'm talking about. Oh man, I am so excited to hunt down a copy of it and watch it through these 2010 eyes of mine. I'm sure it's going to be a difficult experience, but as a child, sitting next to my sister, I was riveted. (My husband says it's because of the young Carl Weathers, but he's being a creep.) I watched this whole movie  - stayed up "way past bedtime" - and cried at the end when {SPOILER ALERT} the girl was under water riding on the giant turtle that had THEIR NAMES ETCHED IN IT FROM WHEN THEY WERE KIDS. Oh my! Good Lord!

Oh yeah, why am I telling you about all of this. I don't know. I mean, I got so excited about finding The Bermuda Depths, I had to tell someone. Oh. Why do I bring this up at all? I guess because as two of my first loves, they really got to me. Judging something as a "good story" is clearly a subjective thing, and in both of these cases, I was a small child, and my love for these two things was completely raw, I was wide open for them every single time. I didn't know movies or music, I was looking for something that worked ON me, something that I intuitively wrapped my arms around and fell completely in love with.

And that's exactly what happened with The Sword.

I know that "Good story" and "good writing" can be two totally different things. But in these three cases, including my first-true-comic-book-series-love The Sword, they all have definitive beginnings, middles and ends. Okay, Bermuda Depths is sorta a fantasy thing, but still, at the end - and I still remember this - Magus let's go of Jennie. He takes of the shell necklace that symbolized their connection and throws it off the back of the boat he's on. (That's when we see her swim way below on the turtle. I swear Styx's Come Sail Away began to play at that point, but I could be wrong. Maybe it was wishful, little girl thinking.) In Billy Don't Be a Hero, even though his fiancee asked him to "keep his hand low," Billy volunteered for battle one day and went and got himself killed. Leaving a very sad fiancee behind.

Clearly the emotion and motivation of love is wide awake and alive in both of my childhood loves. That's what was at the core of those stories and the basis of my emotional experience and connection to them. It's in the Sword as well. Throughout this epic story, Dara is avenging the sudden, terrifying and cruel deaths of her family members. Along the path of her journey, their were concise, specific flashbacks of her memories of her family members. They weren't always fond memories of them. They were full and often difficult interactions that Dara had with them, those moments in life that stick out, that never fade. Moments that defined her relationship with her sister, her father and her mother. Difficulties aside, each memory depicted a real family love, where each family member took the time to be with Dara and really love her. Complicated moments, not a mashed up collection of "you're the greatest! I love you so much!" kind of memories. No, those vignettes were stories that depicted the way Dara had come, as an adult, to define loyalty, integrity, honor, courage and humility. Real, true love of a family member. These stories were so usually placed in a way that treated them as Dara's fuel for revenge, her extra dose of motivation to take on the biggest, scariest monsters she's ever seen, and as part of the lessons she was drawing from in those moments of battle. That's not all they were though. Those moments showed who she was, how she got there, and they made her real to me, they made me care about her and what she'd lost way back in those first issues.

It's like The Sword is a version of the Hero's Journey, like the "magical information" that comes to her is from a wizard or a guru -- it's from her family, it's her past, it's what she was thinking about at the time. And I suppose that's why I freakin' LOVED it when she kicked ass! I've never seen anything like this in print. The element of surprise in the wounds she inflicted when she unleashed her fury through the Sword was mind-blowing! Once again, let me tell make it clear: I hate gore. I do not go to horror movies. I watch violence on television with my fingers across my eyes. But in this book, I LOVED watching Dara, motivated by love, slit people's jaws in half.

So, here I am with the last issue. I don't want to spoil anyone else's enjoyment of this series, so I'll try to talk about it as vaguely as I can, but in all honesty, that's going to be very difficult. I really like that The Sword came to a true end. I wasn't sure if it was going to be a faux ending that led into a new series. Isn't that how everything happens these days? One TV series ends, but don't worry! There's a spin-off! Even when a movie doesn't have a sequel coming, well, somehow everything heads for a "happily ever after."

That isn't the case in The Sword. It wraps up in just the way it promised it might a few issues back. I applaud the Luna brothers for that. I love their integrity.

So, how was this last issue as a whole? Well, first there was a lot of narration about how Phaistos came to be standing here. I loved the mythology that was created for this series. LOVE it. It's another thing that made the experience so charming. To not only have the story of Dara and her family, but this epic and ancient backstory of the Gods who created the Sword? Just when you think the story couldn't go any further, we'd get a little bit of the mythology. The only drawback is that when the story goes there it's, well, mostly just that. The telling of a story. It's a very interesting story, for sure. There are some really cool drawings and mind-stretching thoughts about Phaistos sinking down to the Earth's core and how his character developed as he spend hundreds or thousands of years trying to get back to our layer of the Earth. But of course, that doesn't provide a lot of crazy action. There's very little Sword action, that is. That's okay though. There's been lots of cri-ZAY-zy action in previous issues.

As we inched to the very end, I loved the layout. A sort of modern comic book triptych. The story of Dara's family's past, the most recent past when she got rid of the sword and her current circumstance as she crawls her way home to end the story right where it started for her. I found that really powerful. And that ending- okay, sorry, because I can't NOT talk about it - with her sitting underneath her house, right where she found the sword and moaning as all her wounds, from throughout the series, begin to reappear. Those drawings are amazing. Just amazing.

And that was it. That's exactly how it ends, there's no sugar coating it. There's no deus ex machina. Nothing. The story came to its natural conclusion. The Sword is gone, all her wounds that it healed are re-emerging, and Dara is dead, "with" her family.

So BRAVO! BRAVO, I say! You never forget your first love. I'll never forget you. And ya know what? I can always re-read you some time. Which means, I've officially crossed over to comic-book fan. Yay, me!

-Nina Stone, 2010

Nina's other columns on The Sword:
The Sword # 1
The Sword # 2-6
The Sword # 7-8
The Sword # 8-12
The Sword # 13-18
The Sword # 19-22
The Sword # 23

Comments

[Kenny Cather]

I enjoyed this review a lot. It was fun reading about a song and TV movie from your youth that affected you so much and thinking back on what affected me similarly. I really enjoyed this!

While I didn't read The Sword, I am reading American Vampire just to keep up with the column!

[John Pontoon]

Wasn't "The Sword" just really completely superb? And, like, nobody around this crazy web of ours is saying anything about it except Nina here* and it only gets two comments and one of them is me. What a fucking crime, right? People ought to be crapping their shirts over the power of "The Sword." That story totally kicked my guts in the nuts.

*I am not at all trying to denigrate Ms. Stone, merely to observe that she is but one being, however excellent and distinguished in her tastes she may be.

[Tucker Stone]

Tom Spurgeon used to mention it pretty frequently, that's where I first heard about it. But you're right about it not getting a lot of notice, which is too bad. It's remarkable how the last few issues proved wrong every misgiving I had (you too, right?) about the gaping plotholes in the initial stories. This is one of the most well-planned versions of an action serial I've read in years.

[Matthew J. Brady]

I think the AV Club put it on their yearly top 10 list a couple years back, which made everybody scratch their heads. Maybe if I had actually read it, I wouldn't have whined about their poor taste. That assumption just made an ass out of me.

[Tucker Stone]

Nah, I love the AV Club, but I haven't paid attention to what they say about comics for a long time, unless it's an interview. You're totally justified in assumption before evidence when they're the source.

[John Pontoon]

The answer is indeed, "Yes, me too." We read Justin's weak-assed narrative, "Blah blah then he told these totz awesomez stories about Zakros, they were teh inspiration like he was Peter Cetera," and we thought, Jesus this is some lame exposition, but what the hell, disbelief must be suspended.

And then the big reveal comes around and caulks the weak wall. It's especially impressive in the context of this moment we now live in, where pretty much every Climactic Story Twist we've seen since forever has made no fucking sense at all when everything we had seen up to then is considered. (Like, wait, so his master plan is to blow up a whole ship to kill the only man who has EVER seen him, and the culmination of the plan has him being looked at and spoken to for two hours by an entire police station? And he's the most geniusest evil bad man evah? For real? That is one god damned stupid master plan, then, right?)

[Tee]

Yes, Come Sail Away was at the end. I was googling that song a couple weeks ago to find out what tv movie that song was played at the end. I couldn't remember the movie and wanted to so bad because I was also a little girl mesmerized by that movie. It finally came to me to google giant sea turtle/70's Tv movie.