The Bend of Luck by Peter and Maria Hoey

Peter and Maria Hoey - they're brother and sister, and work together despite living at opposite ends of the North American continent - make comics that look like no one else's.

They look like other things, though: when I read Animal Stories, I thought the visual style was reminiscent of online Flash-game graphics, something flat and clear and schematic. Reading another one of their books, I see similarities to advertising art, or some kind of informative pamphlet.

It looks impersonal, maybe official. There's a chilliness baked in on a basic level, in the backgrounds and facial expressions. And their writing leans into that feeling, too - it's clearly deeply purposeful - with distanced narration and a flat affect.

None of the characters in The Bend of Luck are named. For any particular scene, "the man" and "the woman" and "his partner" and "his father" works fine - occasionally, they need to specify "the old man." The Hoeys mostly lay this out in an unconventional five-panel layout: four squarish panels for the four corners, a circular inset in the middle, reading rigidly NW, NE, center, SW, SE. Characters live in environments that look like they came out of a template: city streets, wilderness, mid-century urban interiors. Clothing is similarly templated, precise, looking just like the abstraction of itself from an official government handout.

The story the Hoeys tell here is expansive, and takes time to come into focus. They tell it in fragments, in fourteen separate chapters that cover what eventually is clearly two generations of the same family, in San Francisco and a wilderness region, suitable for mining, somewhere more-or-less nearby. The two generations aren't this generation - the more modern sections seem to take place in the 1930s, or the '50s - but dates aren't important to begin with.

In this fictional world, luck has a physical form. It can be found and mined, retrieved and sold. It is fragile, dissolving on contact with air. It is valuable but illegal, sought by gamblers and other underworld types. And two prospectors, down on their luck, find a vein of it, under a river, in the earlier generation.

Meanwhile, a generation later, we see a man disappear, and his wife cope with his loss.

The main prospector - the other is, pointedly, "his partner" - and the man in San Francisco are the central characters, and turn out to be father and son, but we will meet many other people along the way: sailors and gangsters, hat shoppers and Western thugs. And we learn more about how luck works, by the end: in particular, that our assumption that "luck" means "good luck" is not necessarily true.

Again, it's all chilly, deliberately distanced. Not quite a fable, but inevitable, inexorable, already determined. All in a look and an idiom like no one else's comics. It's good stuff, rich and deep and worth spending the time to think through and pay close attention to. And I'm happy to see the Hoeys have another book coming out soon to look forward to.