Pop Gun War, Vol. 1: Gift by Farel Dalrymple

Maybe I thought going back to the beginning would give me some clarity: I've read Farel Dalrymple's work before [1], enjoying and engaging with it without actually getting it, so I dropped back to the beginning of his career.

I still enjoyed and engaged with Pop Gun War, Vol. 1: Gift, which collects the first five issues of his first solo comic - the edition I read is from 2016, but basically the same material was collected in 2003. And I have to say I still don't get it, though this is closer to stories I recognize.

Pop Gun War is urban fantasy, mostly: set in an unnamed City - there's a map before the story pages - where strange and mysterious things happen to a large cast with loose and tenuous connections. It's all street-level; they're ordinary people - well, ordinary enough, for this city, but I'll get to that - rather than mayors and tycoons or even store owners and mid-career professionals.

I should also say there are no pop guns, and no obvious war: the title is a metaphor. As usual for Dalrymple, I can't quite explain that metaphor.

The central character is Sinclair: that's him on the cover. He witnesses an unnamed angel fall from the sky and then pay a workman to cut off his wings. Sinclair grabs those wings out of the trash and runs away with them, later attaching them to his own back. This is urban fantasy: the wings work. (Or perhaps, as we learn later, those wings aren't what really works.)

The rest of the events circle him; he's a viewpoint and a center. But there's no linear plot, and the events don't necessarily align with each other, either. What we have, instead, is a cluster of characters doing things, some of them opposed to each other:

• Addison, a bearded guy - maybe a bum? - who maybe finds meaning in his life by engaging with others, especially Sinclair
• Emily, Sinclair's musician older sister, who might be supposed to take care of him but is often absent for extended periods, touring with her band The Emilies
• Koole, a creepy smiling villain (?)
• The Rich Kid, who is clearly not one of the good people, either, and sometimes seem to be in league with Koole
• Percy, a giant, flying goldfish in glasses who nevertheless does not talk
• Sunshine, a small man in a large top hat who grows over the course of the book - no, literally, he's as tall as a five-story building when he marches off into the sea with his good friend Percy. He's also probably "magic" in some deep way the story doesn't want to explain. It's unclear if he's a source or a symptom.
• Mr. Grimshaw, a government (?) functionary who may be scheming to kidnap children and/or steal some vital essence from them and/or something vaguely in that story-space

There are also a group of unnamed, random neighborhood kids, who are both antagonists - trying to destroy Sinclair's wings, part of Koole and The Rich Kid's attempts to create chaos - and plot tokens, as they are dragged away from the normal city streets in Mr. Grimshaw's diabolical plans.

Again: all of these things do not connect with each other. My sense is that each of the five issues here is a story of its own, with the same essential cast, but it's more like a commedia dell'arte ensemble than a mini-series: everyone has their roles and functions, but they're doing a different iteration each time.

I still don't really get it, on the level that I'd like to. I love Dalrymple's inky drawings, and the way the story pops out into full-page color - mostly soft and muted, maybe watercolor? - here and there. His dialogue is quirky but believable, and this is an interesting, distinctive urban fantasy world even if I couldn't tell you how it works or what's important. That's how Dalrymple works, or at least how his stuff always strikes me: if you're interested in books that are interesting but stay tantalizingly out of focus to your conscious mind, try his stuff.

[1] See my post on It Will All Hurt, where I laid out my "I don't get Dalrymple" theory, and also Proxima Centauri and The Wrenchies.