By Thomas Maluck — Hello Bookcase readers, I’m Thomas Maluck, filling in for Harry Kassen for this installment of Comics Anatomy. When Harry invited me to write a guest piece, I thought about different comics I hold in high esteem and what superlative qualities stood out for dissection and highlighting. I decided to pick something brand-new and of the moment - No One’s Rose from publisher Vault Comics.

Vault has been on fire these past few years - as Warren Ellis put it on the occasion of Vertigo’s shuttering, “Companies like Vault Comics have stepped into the breach, to be sure — their line is very much an early-Vertigo ideal.” Vault specializes in original, high-concept horror, sci-fi, and fantasy with a unique voice. For this edition of Comics Anatomy, I would like to examine the use of setting in the first issue of No One’s Rose and how it builds a world for its characters as well as the reader in an efficient, dynamic way. The creative team includes writers Zac Thompson and Emily Horn, illustrator Alberto Alburquerque, colorist Raul Angulo, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.

The premise already demands good use of setting: in the near future, Earth is less than hospitable to humanity. Superstorms ravage a polluted, scarred wasteland outside a giant biodome known as the Green Zone, the only known space where plants still grow with regularity and society lives on with a stronger relationship with nature than we perhaps have right now. Within that society is a lower and upper class, with the lower class performing manual labor like filtering water from feces and the upper class pats themselves on the back in the scenic upper levels. From the jump, that’s four sets of circumstances, and the locations within the issue give us a couple more nested deeper in each category. Thompson and Horn plot out the events of the issue so that the reader moves from the outside of the Green Zone inward, always progressing to a new angle on the setting that reveals more about the world of this story and its solarpunk culture.

What are the techniques that get us from one point to the next? Without walking through every last story beat in sequence, I would like to describe the techniques themselves and what I get out of them. I’m not terribly academic with my terminology - a lot of my favorite comics breakdowns amount to, “Get a load of that,” and I want us to get a load of No One’s Rose together.

One Narrator Linking Two Scenes

First, there’s an action sequence of someone retrieving a sapling just before his seeming doom, narrated by Gavrillo from the very next scene as she retrieves a sapling as part of a lesson for some Green Zone cadets. Her description of the state of the world sets up the raw, lethal danger faced by the rogue sapling gatherer as well as the more prepared, educational morsel of excitement the cadets experience. Better yet, because Gavrillo’s narration starts before she is shown, we somewhat know her apparent level of maturity and expertise by the time she appears, and her scene on the page cements those impressions. The reader gets three takes on the scene in one swoop: the rogue’s, Gavrillo’s, and that of her students. How efficient! The reader has barely entered the Green Zone and already has a sense of encroaching danger vs established safety.

Establishing Shots

The full-page external shot of the Green Zone gives you all the basic settings at a glance: the stormy exterior, the green-and-blue interior surrounded by pattern and structure, supporting a massive tree and stuffed with buildings, and life within the biodome separated by two strata. This is a basic building block of visual storytelling, and if it didn’t appear somewhere in this issue, I would have a bone to pick. A similar moment occurs elsewhere in the story to show off the characters taking in an area of the biodome that is brand new to them, and that establishing shot similarly takes up a lot of pulp estate while accomplishing several goals at once.

Can I take a moment to observe the three different means of picking up on a two-page spread these days? There’s print reading, wherein the reader turns the page and gets the full widescreen effect at once. In most digital comics apps, the spread is shrunk down to fit the screen, so the reader has to recognize this and turn their device around so the image auto-adjusts and, one hopes, looks decent on that display. (Don’t trust any tablet review that criticizes cinematic proportions, by the way.) Third, when reading a digital PDF, most readers show the left page of the spread, usually making it mistakable for just another page in a long vertical scroll, when that specific page can be dragged sideways or zoomed out to see the whole thing. Whew, who would’ve thought a wider perspective would be so complex?

Tracking Shot

A dying leaf falls from a tree branch, dangling in the air through the heights of the city, passing buildings, trains, and finally, a laboratory established for the study of plant life. I love techniques like this, that take place diegetically while drawing the reader’s eye. The leaf appears in alternating right-left-right-left positions from panel to panel, reinforcing the traditional zig-zag comics reading line. Gavrillo ends up looking out the train window soon after, causing reflection on how each part of the city views the others. Notice that the comic opens with new life being plucked from a wasteland while a sign of decay goes gliding down in the eco-friendly space.

Perspectives Above, Below, and Level

Here is a child-friendly test for whether a setting is fun to take in: could someone “walk” across it with their index and middle fingers? Depicting dialog as two talking heads is a well-known momentum killer in comics; use of the same perspective and sight lines is another. There is a scene in which Gavrillo and Seren climb up a spiral stairway, which is depicted from above. When they reach the top, the view is revealed from below, because they’ve climbed so high. This technique may seem as simple as “don’t draw a fist connecting with its target, show the instant afterward,” but it’s effective nonetheless. Even better, when Seren steps down to help Gavrillo, the perspective changes to an even level, and readers can see between the steps as a result. Alburquerque does a great job of making sure readers move through scenes as much as the characters.

Keep Moving While Standing Still

Speaking of depicting dialog, there are two sets of dialog between a brother and sister set within a kitchen and bedroom of their house. Within these two spots of domesticity are several clues as to how this biodome’s society operates, and they take place during the siblings’ back and forth patter*. We see they eat from a bowl of greens, a sign of the typical diet within Green Zone, and even stranger is the living food disposal that devours scraps. What is this futuristic Flintstones appliance? No matter; it’s just enhancing the setting while the siblings’ personalities clash and expositions unroll. Also of note is how the brother’s enjoyment of music through headphones is addressed as “anthropocentric” plastic and therefore harmful to the world, followed by a view of his room where movie and musician posters cover the walls. In the eco-friendly future, resistance is holding tight to your Akira memorabilia. Readers also get a glimpse of a scene to come via the brother’s map - every scene builds up another one in some way.

*Another neat effect: the opening panel for the scene is of the sister alone in a wide panel, with narrative boxes off to the side. As soon as her brother storms in, the paneling and word balloons stay relatively tight and sometimes overlapping, a visual cue that they box each other in anytime they’re in the same room.

A Kiss That Leaves You Walking On Air

Seren observes the people around him at street level, then climbs up a tree with a hunky fellow of prestigious rank and is promptly -- well, see for yourself:

To the Green Zone’s credit, their exchange seems to be hidden for reasons other than lingering bigotry. 

Thanks for reading Comics Anatomy. No One’s Rose is available in physical and digital storefronts. If you like comics that remind you of diagrams of Dr. Wily’s castle or maps of the Dead Cells biomes, I think you will get a kick out of it. Comparing the advance digital copy and official print release, I am happy to notice the addition of a full-page Green Zone map with some lore on the history of the Green Zone to go with it, reinforcing the book’s strong sense of location. The addition was news to me, but someone browsing the shelf might see the map and think, “Oh, it’s one of those kinds of comics.” And they’d be right.

No One’s Rose #1
Writer: Emily Horn & Zac Thompson
Artist: Alberto Jimenez-Alburquerque
Colorist: Raul Angulo
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Publisher: Vault Comics
Price: $3.99
"Centuries after the fall of the Anthropocene, the last vestiges of human civilization are housed in a massive domed city powered by renewable energy, known as The Green Zone. Inside lives teenager Tenn Gavrilo, a brilliant bio-engineer who could rebuild the planet. But there's one problem: her resentful brother Seren is eager to dismantle the precarious Utopia. From the minds of Zac Thompson (X-Men, Yondu) and debut writer Emily Horn with artist Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque (Letter 44, Avengers ) comes a gorgeous and green solar-punk world filled with strange biotechnology, harsh superstorms, and divisive ideologies-ideologies that will tear Tenn and Seren down to their roots as they fight for a better Earth."
Release Date: March 25, 2020
Read Our Full Review: Click Here!
Buy It Online: Click Here!

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Thomas Maluck is a public librarian in Columbia, South Carolina who reviews graphic novels for No Flying No Tights and School Library Journal. He also co-hosts a podcast about comics and libraries called The Secret Stacks. You can find him on Twitter @LiberryTom.