Review: Folk #4 by Tyler Stafford

FOLK #4
Tyler Stafford
www.tylerstafford.com

This fourth issue of Tyler Stafford’s self-published series announces inside the front cover that, due to computer issues, this issue has been printed at a much larger size than previous installments, on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Without having seen the first three issues of Folk, I can only say that Stafford’s work seems destined for this size; it is hard to imagine him working on a smaller canvas since his work is so expansive, so bold in its layouts and graphics, that it reads as though he intended the art to be this big all along.

Indeed, much of the impact of Folk #4’s 21-page story is its sharp, brilliant art and design. The story itself is a brief sci-fi vignette, not so much a fully developed story as a glimpse of a world. It’s the year 2147, and teens with snazzy space-age outfits and outrageous cyberpunk haircuts are all raving about the newest craze: sharing other people’s dreams. The “dreamers” are like rock stars, releasing tapes of their nocturnal adventures for others to vicariously experience. This story is mostly about one dreamer who commits suicide, and a young fan who then “feels” his last released dream.

So it comes across as an introductory bit of sci-fi world-building, maybe, but Stafford’s visuals weave a compelling and deeply felt story from this minimal foundation. The story is told almost entirely without conventional panel borders. Instead, the “panels” flow into one another across the page, creating complex layouts where bits of geography serve as de facto boundaries. The first page is laid out in a zig-zag pattern where the perspective subtly shifts as though a camera was turning in an arc to observe the scene from multiple angles. It sounds confounding, but Stafford has a deft feel for these kinds of layouts, and his storytelling is as clear as it is unconventional.

The comic’s climax, of course, is the dream itself, and it’s as mind-bending as expected. Curiously, Stafford here eschews the free-floating panel-less style of the rest of the comic, which is the opposite of what one would expect. Instead, the dream, spread out across three pages, has a formalist precision that gives each image a crystalline impact. Each page is built around a diamond-shaped central panel with the young fan, Hollika, staring straight ahead through the goggles she puts on to experience this dream. The page is then split in half, with a fan of rhombus-like panels emanating out from the center like rays. On the left half of the page, Hollika experiences the dream as though it was her own, while on the right, in a mirror image, the original dreamer experiences a denuded version of it, with the words stripped away and empty word balloons in their place. It’s as though the dreamer’s ghost is haunting the dream, flitting through a memory that’s been drained of its personal resonances by his decision to sell it. It’s thrilling comics, especially when, on the bottoms of the second and third pages, the dreamer and Hollika begin to meld together, their heads overlaying one another as they relive the same mindscapes.

This is a great, poignant comic, and also a daringly experimental one, a comic where form and content are not only united but feed into one another, creating deeper meanings and effects. Stafford is obviously a talent to watch, an artist with strong traditional storytelling skills wedded to a crisp, pleasing style and a bent for experimentation.