King of Nowhere #1 is out March 4, 2020. — **King of Nowhere #1** is out March 4, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — When I read the first issue of a new series, I do so the first time through without looking at the pitch, premise, or summary. This isn’t the reality that we live in, but my thinking is that the interior of the book should be able to stand alone, or maybe that’s my hope. Often times, I have to go back afterward, checkout the marketing, read the solicit and then come back to the material with a more informed eye — and then I start jotting notes.

King of Nowhere #1, however, inspired me to start that note jotting process on the first read through. In fact, as I sit here now, I still haven’t looked at the marketing material or the summary in the solicit. There’s a lot going on here, which I think is perhaps best described as a fluidity of genre, interests, and tone. Like most new comics, King of Nowhere opens with a not unfamiliar premise...an alcoholic awakens in a field, unaware of how he got there and quick about the business of bemoaning his choices and lifestyle.

It’s the type of opening — penned by writer W. Maxwell Prince and illustrated by Tyler Jenkins ethereal linework and gorgeous wavy palette — that evokes almost a storytelling trope, leaving the audience to expect an exploration of this man as an anti-hero with severe-yet-justifiable demons a cool guy could be secretly proud of as he gets swept up in a mob story that probably also has zombies or something. You know, the comics usual.

And this book is still likely to be an exploration of interiority and personal trials — but there’s swerve fast into this debut that signals a wholly different and far more interesting intent. It’s a turn toward the illogical and surreal, and it’s at the heart of what makes this comic work (and it works well, ranking as one of the best new #1 issues of the year to date).

This book becomes something else — a story rich with dreams that might not be dreams but definitely evoke the idea of hallucination. Hallucinations and dreams are uniquely difficult to write about in any way that doesn’t make an audience tune out, but comics as a medium is positioned well to elucidate ideas from the ether, as is most famously evidenced by Sandman, basically capital L Literature at this point. It is perhaps easier with a comic to keep the reader oriented while blurring lines between what's real and what’s not, perhaps easier than film and television, mediums that practically dare the reader to figure out what’s actually happening. In comics, however, you can proceed through dreamscapes at your own pace, go back and forward in time as you choose, and sort as little or as much out as you want without a deadline to sort the narrative. This book gets that.

On a craft level, the art is fantastic here. This book asks Jenkins to do a lot, to keep things recognizable yet imaginative, to display a high level of versatility that ties it all together — and Jenkins nails it. There’s a feeling that comes through in a comic when an artist is empowered with creative freedom they have maybe lacked due to the concepts of other recent projects, and it’s on full display with Jenkins work here, which is lively and unbound at every turn (except when the story calls for grittier bits of fear or intimidation). The script itself, meanwhile, is relentlessly clever, engaging in smart wordplay, which is a thing (look at my own wordplay, would ya...a thing!) that is often rare in monthly comics, where the easy and obvious jokes tend to reign. Prince also feels untethered from reality here as a writer, to the point I wouldn’t be surprised if this book started out considerably more straightforward and then ended up in the more surreal territory that takes over as an effect of Prince following his creative fancy. That, of course, is the goal of writing stories — to get to a place where the story itself dictates what it needs to be past an author’s preconceived notions.

Overall: It’s a young year, but so far in 2020 no book has felt as purely imaginative as King of Nowhere #1, in which readers can feel both writer and artist elevating to a place where the story sheds any preconceived notions and dictates the wild thing it must be. 10/10

King of Nowhere #1
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Tyler Jenkins
Colorist: Hilary Jenkins
Letterer: Andworld Design
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Price: $3.99
Solicit: Eisner Award-nominated writer W. Maxwell Prince (Ice Cream Man) comes to BOOM! Studios with Eisner-nominated artist Tyler Jenkins (Grass Kings, Black Badge) for an unforgettable thriller that explores the miraculous, the mundane, and all the mysteries in between. Lovable drunken lowlife Denis awakens on the outskirts of a mysterious village called Nowhere, home to a friendly populace of deformed, mutated, just-left-of-normal citizens-and he has no memory of how he got there. But just when Denis starts to regain his memories, his past catches up to him... literally. What at first seems like merely a bad trip quickly heightens into a drama of mistaken identities, small-town conspiracy, and high-stakes fantasy fulfillment.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.