Fragile Prophet has one trick in it and I really should have seen it coming. It was so obvious, I’m not even sure there’s an intended deception. Maybe it’s because the comic has a lengthy scene at a carnival. Whenever there’s a carnival in the modern context, it’s overpowering, since the carnival is so anti-modern. I highly doubt the writer, Jeff Davidson, intended the carnival to pull the wool over my eyes, but it did. Or at least it’s the scapegoat for me not getting the obvious.
The carnival, following a scene at a low-rate Wal-Mart clone, sets Fragile Prophet up in a lower brow world, but it doesn’t stay. Even the move to daytime television has unexpected results. The story is about two brothers--one is mentally disabled and sees the future and the other cares for him and manages his career. The caretaker is never presented as a smart guy. There’s one scene--at the carnival of all places--where I thought the boss was talking down to him, until I realized the guy was sincere. Fragile Prophet is filled with sincere characters. More, they’re good people. My fiancée has a thing about my writing, she likes it when everyone’s (basically) good. I’ve written one story with such good people. Good people tend to be out in American fiction. Or at least the good American fiction. Fragile Prophet has a small cast--five or six major characters--and I suppose it’s not too unbelievable they’re all decent human beings. It’s interesting to read something where you like all the characters--and Davidson makes you like them. There’s no agreement these are good people. He establishes them quickly and as likable folks. I might have read something into Fragile Prophet, an apprehension about the caretaker’s motives, but it didn’t hurt the experience. Davidson doesn’t even play the mentally disabled one for sympathy, but there’s hardly time for him to do it.
While the comic is about two brothers, it’s not about brotherhood. Fragile Prophet jumps around. Its present action seems to cover a year and a half, long enough for the titular prophet to get famous and the brother to develop a relationship with an unlikely girl. We don’t get to see a lot in Prophet--we don’t get to see the getting famous or the relationship start (we don’t even get to see a lot of superfluous fortunetelling, any actually). Instead Davidson keeps it tight around one aspect of the characters’ lives. It could have been called The Fragile Prophet and Sicilian Jay it’s so narrow. This narrowness isn’t a bad thing, but it does turn Fragile Prophet into a thriller. It’s separated into three chapters, and--obviously, it’s about fortunetelling--there’s some horrible future event we can’t escape. I felt anxious reading Fragile Prophet, worried and hopeful, always good things in a comic book, since they’re emotions absent from mainstream comic book reading and too many independent comic books follow. I engaged Fragile Prophet and, while I’m not thrilled with the handling of the end (since it wasn’t a brothers story), it paid off.
The art, by Stephen R. Buell, fits the story perfectly--though the way he draws noses, I never knew if people were supposed to be good-looking or not, which mattered (a lot) three times. It’s emotive art for some of it--lots of people thinking and feeling without talking in Fragile Prophet--and Buell’s got a nice handle on places people in their environments to suggest emotions. There are also a number of lengthy conversations and Buell does them well too. My only qualm with it--besides the nose-less good-looking people--are a handful of full page establishing shots. Fragile Prophet is 112-pages, which isn’t a lot for a comic book, and sacrificing ten pages isn’t good economy, especially since the last five or six pages are spent on an effect ending. Poets get to visually place words for effect--or, I should say, poets often do place words for effect (they don’t have to, of course)--and fiction writers can as well, less frequently, but in comic books, the visual placement of words and images, it’s almost limitless. And Fragile Prophet goes overboard, with a healthy exuberance. It’s a passionate telling of its story and that passion doesn’t get in the reader’s way, it just fuels a good comic book.