Back in the Golden Age, William Moulton Marston imagined a world of fairy tales from which storytellers were inadvertently channeling their fiction. The existence of comic book writers in the universes they develop and the occasional breaking of the fourth wall implies a much deeper connection between artist and art than is often explored on the comic book page. Artist/writer Szymon Kudranski focuses on the interplay between imagination and reality in the debut of his new series Something Epic. Though the central drama that Kudranski is playing on feels a bit weak, there is a horror at the heart of it that could prove to be interesting as the series progresses.

Danny Dillon is a fourteen-year-old kid suffering from some kind of mental illness...or maybe it’s just an unusual sensitivity to the way reality “really” is. Fictional characters inhabit a world that very few others are capable of seeing, even though it is one that surrounds them completely. The characters in question don’t all seem to know that Danny can see them either. He’s caught between a couple of different worlds as he tries to navigate a potentially dangerous fusion of fiction, fantasy, and weird reality. 

The story that Kudranski is delivering makes it to the page under the influence of really, really heavy first-person narration. Panels illustrate the world as seen through Danny’s eyes while his internal monologue introduces the reader to himself and his struggle with reality. There isn’t a heck of a lot of insight into the nature of reality, fantasy, or anything else in Danny’s narration. Danny’s only just trying to figure it all out himself, and so it feels very much as though insight could develop as Danny does. The first issue manages only to outline Danny’s predicament. Anything more profound than that will have to wait.

Kudranski’s art is suitably impressive. There’s a rich depth to the fantasy that Kudranski is putting on the page. Every one of the fictional characters that Danny is interacting with seems to come from a drastically different universe. Kudranski isn’t trying to make it feel beautiful and wondrous. There’s a clear edge of darkness and nightmare about Danny’s world that comes across quite well. Deeper matters of Danny’s sanity and the dangerous nature of the world that he’s inhabiting are far removed from the visual world that Kudranski is putting down on the page. 

There’s real potential for a horror like the one Kudranski is developing for the series. It’s an attractive concept: everything in every fantasy world that you’ve ever encountered actually exists alongside everyone you know in your “real” waking life. Given the right framing of the concept and the right creative momentum, Something Epic could really turn into something overwhelmingly cool and close to genius. At the end of the first issue, however, it’s very difficult to tell whether or not it might simply be cheesy horror with a reasonably novel premise.

Grade: B