“The Death Of The Master,” The End Of An Era

Last month’s release of Patrick Kyle’s The Death Of The Master from Koyama Press was both an auspicious and somber occasion — auspicious because it marked the ambitious fleshing-out of a self-published mini into a 244-page “graphic novel” of remarkable texture and character, somber because it meant the end of the road for an exceptionally fruitful relationship between cartoonist and publisher that’s offered readers a privileged glimpse at the upward trajectory of the former’s artistic development with the latter’s full faith and support every step of the way. We’re all going to miss Annie Koyama’s publishing efforts when she fully transitions into “patronage mode” after next year, it’s true, but no one will miss her more than the talented people she’s shepherded from “promising newcomer” to “fully-formed, utterly unique creator.”

Certainly last year’s Roaming Foliage offered lead pipe-cinch evidence that Kyle had completed that trek from point A to point B, but like any artist worth their salt, he’s now pushing himself ever onward, forward, and upward, as this new work serves up a challenging piece of top-to-bottom absurdist “world-building” that is simultaneously funny, smart, idiosyncratic, and all too easy to relate to — which is no easy task considering that we’re talking about a society populated by vaguely dinosaur-ian “people” who are all engaged in the factory production of small edible (among other things, it would seem) balls and take their marching orders from the book’s titular (and delusional) master, who communicates by means of public loudspeaker system.

Employing one unique perspective shot after another, Kyle’s clean-line cartooning is ambitious in its ersatz simplicity, consistently inviting readers to decipher the meaning behind his “camera angle” choices and how they relate to the nuts and bolts of his tight ensemble-cast narrative. Since the title itself “spoils” the book’s crucial turning point I needn’t feel guilty for letting you know that the master does, indeed, die, but that’s more a beginning than end, as Kyle’s real raison d’etre here in an exploration of the nature of change itself, and the tension that arises between the polarities of “anything is possible now” and “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It would be spoiling things to say which, if either, wins out here, but like any journey into the unknown, this one is about said journey every bit as much as its destination, and convincing arguments are made both for and against the status quo by means of the rich internal lives of Kyle’s magnificently-realized characters. If you’re getting the distinct sense that I’m having a tough time finding any flaws with this one, then I guess I’m doing something right.

Which isn’t to say that this story will appeal to all tastes, of course : it’s a work that requires readers to do a lot of the heavy interpretative work themselves, so while the entirety of its 224 pages can be absorbed on a purely liminal level in 30 minutes tops, if you devote the time to it that it both asks for and earns, you’ll find yourself exercising the ol’ gray matter for several hours, at least, and likely returning to it later. Around here, we just call that getting your money’s worth.

In fairness, though, for a dense and complex work, The Death Of The Master effectively disguises itself as anything but. Kyle’s greatest skill, in fact, is his ability to couch the genuinely thought-provoking within the context of the breezy, the fluid — the aesthetically innovative, sure, but at the same time the easily-digestible. Indeed, don’t be surprised if it takes a good 15-20 of this book’s (mostly) two-panel pages before it fully dawns on you that you’ve been lulled into something that you really need to think about. There’s an element of sleight of hand at play here, then, of —apologies to Dan Clowes — the iron hand in the velvet glove. And yet soothing and/or siren-calling can, in the right hands, be a far more compelling method of achieving full audience engagement than exposition or open confrontation, and if there’s one thing we know about Kyle at this stage of his career, it’s that his hands are definitely the right ones — indeed, they’re the only ones capable of telling the types of stories he wants to tell in the manner in which he wants to tell them.

It’s in no way an exaggeration, then, to say this is a singular work by a singular talent related by singular means — the very definition, in my book, of what auteur comics are all about, and one of the most interesting and accomplished reads of the year.

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