I seriously don’t know where to begin with this book.
It’s beautiful, except when it’s grotesque. It’s a straightforward adventure, except when it goes completely off the rails. It’s a fairy tale except when it’s a coming-of-age story, except when it’s a comedy, except when it’s a mystery, except when it’s a myth, except when it’s a poem.
I wasn’t familiar with Tony Sandoval before now (too many giant robots lately I guess) and I hadn’t heard anything about the book beforehand, it was the cover art that convinced me to give it a try. And I’m happy to say it’s not the most gorgeous picture in the book, thank goodness, because I hate it when that happens: you judge a book by its cover and find out the cover was the only thing you liked. Not this one, some of the pages are staggeringly beautiful. There are also a couple pages that are pretty gross, and one or two that are just plain weird, but the balance of the art is beautiful.
Sandoval’s art feels incredibly familiar to me, even though I haven’t read any of his other books, I wasn’t following him on deviantart (till now) and I haven’t found an artist who’s exactly like him. Sometimes it’s sketchy with splashes of watercolors, and sometimes it’s very precise. It has a dark, gothic feel most of the time, but he can go incredibly light and airy when he wants to: he’s just as good at drawing pretty girls in sundresses in grassy fields as he is at drawing badass warrior women in flooded caverns.
The latter being my favorite in this book. There were some epic battle scenes.
As for the story, I’m still not sure what happened, or how to describe it. There’s almost definitely some magic but there’s also a lot that was probably a dream. The book is in English but it was (I believe) originally written in Spanish (I did find an older edition in Italian so I could be wrong about that) before being translated, and it has that feel to it: of a story that feels a little…off, like there’s a piece you might have understood better if you read it in the original language the way it was intended.
That’s not to say it’s badly written, or badly translated. It just feels more like a poem than a traditional story in places. And in some places it is a poem, intentionally, like the beginning of chapter two, one of my favorite bits. It’s several pages where Summer is personified an old man who’s tired of hanging around, walking slower and slower before sinking to the ground, and at the end he reaches out one hand to barely touch someone’s head, before disappearing in a swirl of autumn leaves. The words and the illustrations are lovely.
In the end I recommend giving it a look, either some of the preview pages he’s posted to his deviantart account, or a quick flip through of the book when it hits stores on November 20, though you really should give yourself some time to linger over it. I’m on my second read of it and I keep seeing things I missed, and I’m enjoying it more the second time around, maybe because now I know what to expect.
Watersnakes is available in comic shops today and everywhere November 20.