By Harry Kassen — Victory Point, by Owen D. Pomery, is fiction. This is true of most comics I read, and probably for most people in my orbit. Despite that fact, Victory Point still feels unique among books I’ve read. It’s unique because it foregrounds artifice in a way that feels revolutionary to me. It’s fiction, publicly, and proud of it.

Believability is a big deal in today’s media landscape. Suspension of disbelief enters into many conversations around popular movies, TV shows, and comics. So much of the critical conversation and fan discourse these days revolves around believable worlds and relatable characters. Stories themselves are reshaping to match this demand, with the prevalence of “hard” sci-fi, down to earth fantasy, and other grounded and realistic subgenres that hew as closely as possible to what is strictly believable. Which is why it feels so refreshing to see this story, which could theoretically have actually happened, go out of its way to point out that it’s fake.

What does that mean exactly? In the context of Victory Point there are a lot of things to talk about, but let’s start at the foundation and talk about the general art style and look of the book. Firstly, it’s only available in print, which forces you to look at it the way it’s printed, rather than offering the variety of reading options available with digital copies. The first thing to look at, then, is the way the pages are designed.

Throughout the entire book, the art is confined to a square in the middle of each page, with something like 40% of the page left blank. With that much white space, it’s hard not to notice how much of the page is margin. I point this out not to make a statement about whether the page has enough art on it or if the book is a good deal but to examine how it changes the reading experience.

Putting the art in such a tight space in the middle of the page creates a frame around it, and the visible white space calls attention to the fact that this is a page in a book and not a real event you’re witnessing. Contrast this to the prevalence of full bleed pages, or close, where the art comes right to the edge of the page, or leaves minimal space at the margins. Even the presence of page numbers in Victory Point, something notably absent from most new comics, reminds you that this is a book, as that’s the only place you’d find them.

Beyond the book design, the art style also conveys the idea of artifice. Pomery’s people are not painstakingly realistic depictions of human beings. This is not a shot at him. I don’t think they’re meant to be. What they are is wonderfully expressive representations of humans. With faces simplified down to dots for eyes and a few lines for the rest of the features, leaving the form to the coloring, the people become, essentially, vessels for whatever expression, gesture, or action they are supposed to perform. They are an exercise in pointed minimalism, something that could be said about much of Pomery’s storytelling.

The final foundational element of the book’s use of artifice is the coloring. While I’m not sure about Pomery’s process for drawing this book, it appears to me that the colors were done either with watercolor or with tinted dye, though they may have been digital. Regardless, what I’m interested in is the texture of the coloring. Whether it’s naturally present or added specifically, the book has a toothy or grainy texture to it, like that of a piece of drawing paper, easily seen in the large areas of solid color present in Victory Point.

This, once again, channels artifice in a couple ways. The first occurs when you notice that texture, but maybe don’t look too hard at it and figure out what’s causing it. You see the graininess and it almost reads as though you are separated from the world of the story by a screen of some sort, distorting your view. The second happens when you notice that texture on the page, that looks like a piece of toothy art board, calling to mind the fact that this is a book that was drawn.

All of the visuals that I just described come together to create a very particular impression as you read Victory Point. While I don’t think there’s a perfect way to describe it, the clearly framed images, abstracted people, and heavily mediated visuals all work in tandem to create an experience almost akin to a puppet theater. It bears all the hallmarks of any other type of fiction, but is heavily framed and modeled, clearly not real or even realistic, but no less effective as a result.

Now that we’ve looked at how the comic engages with the aesthetics of artifice, we can take a look at what the actual content of the book is, and how that involves artifice as well.

Victory Point, for those of you who don’t know, is about a woman named Ellen who travels back to her hometown of Victory Point to visit her father. What gives this story depth is that Victory Point is not an ordinary town. The “picturesque, yet architecturally strange” town, as it’s described on the book’s back cover, was designed by the eccentric M.L. Schreiber, with a goal of attracting more people from ethnic minorities to move to rural areas. While it’s never explicitly mentioned in the book, this struck me as likely being related to the British New Towns project. The historical background there isn’t strictly relevant to the book, seeing as Victory Point was constructed before the New Towns Act passed, but it’s interesting and paints a picture, and I’ve read enough about it, so I’ll attempt to give a brief overview here.

Estates by Lynsey Hanley is the main book I read on the subject of British Public Housing. Mainly focuses on the urban variety, but it’s a good, comprehensive history.

Shortly after World War II, the British government began a project of building public housing that the government would own and rent directly to lower income families. This manifested in two ways. The more well known one, at least from my perspective as an American, is the Council Estate. These massive towers were built in urban areas to create large numbers of apartments that could be rented at low prices to affordable families. The other way this project developed was in New Towns. These were attempts at creating entire towns out of whole cloth, and were, like the Estates, often at the cutting edge of urban planning and modern architecture. I won’t get into it all now, but for a wide variety of reasons these projects did not work as planned and were ultimately all but scrapped by the government during the neoliberal shift in the 1980s.

I’ll list some additional reading on this stuff later, but I wanted to make sure there was a little bit of background information on the whole endeavor before diving into how it speaks to Victory Point. With that information about the New Towns, we can see a similar arc for Victory Point being built, with the aforementioned M.L. Schreiber being selected as the lead architect, and how, ultimately, the town never lived up to Schreiber’s intentions for it.

Key thing about Victory Point though, is that it’s fake. Schreiber too. They don’t exist and were invented for this book. Now you might be wondering how these layers of very believable fiction have to do with my points about artifice from before, and that’s a good question. I’ve been looking at the ways these things relate as I write this and I’m not always sure they line up, but I keep coming around to two reasons why it works. The first is relatively simple: the book is set in a fake town designed by a fake architect, when it would have been quite simple to set it in a real town or choose a real architect or both. Pomery, by inventing Victory Point and Schreiber, is choosing fiction over reality. The second is slightly more complicated and requires a look at Pomery’s other work.

Looking at Pomery’s website, you can see that a lot of his work has an architectural focus. Whether they’re editorial illustrations, graphic novel panels, or full on architectural concepts, there’s a focus on the physical design of the physical spaces either in stories or in the real world. There’s a section for what Pomery calls Narrative Architecture, and the description for it is quite revealing for the deeper goals of Victory Point. “Images communicating how the space has been used and how it feels, in addition to its appearance.”

An example from the Narrative Architecture section of Pomery’s website.

In a way, this is a central idea of Victory Point. It’s not just a story about a homecoming but about the ways in which that specific town facilitates a homecoming, and not just about the specific town but the ways in which a homecoming specifically happens in that town. The idea of the use of a space being equally important to both the use and the space itself is an important step away from pure narrative or pure architecture into another realm.

Before coming back to what this means for the book itself, there’s one last section of the website I want to point out. The Concept section features architectural concept drawings, mainly featuring small cutaway drawings of just a slice of an area, usually a single building and its surroundings. These are generally done in the same style as Victory Point.

An example from the Concept section of Pomery’s website.

What we can learn from all of the art on his website is that Pomery is not merely a cartoonist or illustrator but that he works in the realm of architectural drawings as well. Many of the drawings found on the website, in the Concept, Narrative Architecture, and Architecture/Landscape sections, as well as some others scattered throughout, are models of buildings, towns, landscapes, or other constructed objects, either from life or invented. And that’s the key piece right there. Victory Point is the logical end of that quest to take architectural drawing and add a narrative dimension, or to deeply examine the architectural dimension of narrative. The town of Victory Point is one of Pomery’s architectural models, but what sets this one apart from the others, even the ones with people included, is that the people move, and talk, and have lives. They leave the model, and return, and that is all a part of the model.

Looking at the book this way calls to mind the idea of certain works as dollhouses, carefully arranged and sterile. I don’t know that this is appropriate here, but some parts of it surely are. I maintain that my initial description of puppet theater is accurate. It’s framed for the audience, and every aspect is constructed for the purpose. With all of this behind us, it’s now easy to see what the abundance of specifically crafted artifice does for the book. For everything that is fictionalized, Victory Point is no less real. It may not be life as it happens but it is life captured. Life compressed. Life contained. Keeping everything in the realm of the fictional allows for Ellen’s mother to be held at the same level as Victory Point’s imagined architect, which the book does by opening with a quote from one and closing with a quote from the other. By showing us this model of a world, Pomery shows that in this world where everything and everyone is fake, we can see what it is to be real.

Further Reading (as promised) on British Public Housing:

“2. 'A Decent Start in Life' Garden Cities and the First New Towns (1946-51).” Concretopia: A Journey around the Rebuilding of POSTWAR Britain, by John Grindrod, Old Street, 2014, pp. 35–69.
- A good overview of the subject of new towns in particular.
Hanley, Lynsey. Estates: An Intimate History. Granta, 2017.
- An overview of most of the history of Public Housing in the UK. Focuses more on the urban Estates but is very informative.
Meredith, Jesse. “Decolonizing the New Town: Roy Gazzard and the Making of Killingworth Township.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 57, no. 2, 2018, pp. 333–362., doi:10.1017/jbr.2017.236.
- An exploration of the architectural experiments found in the New Towns, with an eye towards the relationship to British colonialism. This one’s an academic article, so it may be a little hard to find. Sorry about that.

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Harry Kassen is a college student and avid comic book reader. When he’s not doing schoolwork or reading comics, he’s probably sleeping. Catch his thoughts on comics, food, and other things on Twitter @leekassen. You can support his writing via Ko-fi.