The mental powers of Liana and Jason... and Xi'an Coy Manh!

The other day I bought the digital version of Colleen Doran's remastered A Distant Soil: The Gathering. I read the first ten or so pages, just enough to get interested. It reminds me of what Chris Claremont was doing with the X-Men around the same time, especially the Marvel Graphic Novel #5: God Loves, Man Kills (November 1982) which introduced some darker, more mature elements. Specifically, kids getting killed for being mutants. Right at the start, too.  This kind of stuff-- and gorier-- happens all the time in the regular monthlies these days, but back then it was startling.

At least it was for me.

By now we're all pretty familiar with the "teens with powers in the hands of sinister researchers" trope.  I'm wondering if good ol' Stephen King isn't the father or at least godfather of this theme in comics.  It wouldn't take much reconfiguring to work Firestarter (1980) into Uncanny X-Men continuity.  And then there's his earlier telekinetic horror classic Carrie (1974) with its epistolary elements for added realism.  I read that for the first time this year and it gave me a strong sense of deja vu.  If only Professor X had detected Carrie White with his Cerebro a lot of kids could have been saved.  Even some jerky ones.  And we shouldn't forget Tia and Tony from Alexander Key's 1968 novel Escape to Witch Mountain, which I first encountered via Disney's sunnier 1975 film adaptation.

When people are working on stories with this element, there are bound to be some similarities.  Why am I telling you all this?  Because right at the beginning of A Distant Soil, I came across this scene:

 

And this one:

 

 

Which immediately reminded me of this, from Marvel Graphic Novel #4: The New Mutants (September 1982):

 

 

And this:

 

Liana and Jason, Colleen Doran's leads, aren't possessing anyone in the same manner as Xi'an Coy Manh as drawn by Bob McLeod, but I'm sure Xi'an would be pleased with how Doran depicts whatever it is they're doing here.  Actually, this early in the story I'm not exactly sure what kind of powers Doran's siblings possess.  They have telekinesis, but the I haven't seen what they can do to the fullest as yet.  I'm looking forward to finding out. 

What's the point of this?  That there are only so many ways to depict mental powers visually and have it read on a comic book page.  McLeod and Doran could just as easily have used the black dots Kirby favored for energy bolts and the movement of water or curvy or dotted lines.  Instead they both hit upon this weird radiating rectangles device and it looks cool as all get out.  And it's just pleasing to me to make a lot of little connections between things.  Magical kids, evil laboratories.  Feeling different or special, identifying with characters who are different and special.  Beautiful artwork in black and white or in color.  Xi'an Coy Manh in just about anything.  After just a few pages of A Distant Soil I'm even more surprised I wasn't all over this back when it first appeared.  It's apparently right in my wheelhouse.

Colleen Doran's "A Distant Soil" is another one of those books I've been meaning to read for years!

This was inevitable.  Last night I bought the digital version of the new remastered A Distant Soil.  I may buy a printed copy, too.  In fact, I will.  Apparently, it's inescapable.

I've followed Colleen Doran's career through interviews and magazine articles for about as long as I can remember, but I'd never actually read a comic she worked on before this year.  I've always admired her artwork-- it's gorgeous-- and respected the way she broke herself into comics at the age I was still just reading them and vaguely dreaming of drawing Uncanny X-Men "when I [grew] up," and how she fought through a lot of crap that would have beaten a weaker person. 

A couple of months ago, I saw through a friend's feed she was on Facebook, thought what she had to say was interesting, started following her.  She's one of those pros who actually engages her followers.  She'll "like" your comment if it's a good one, respond if it moves her to and dispute you if she thinks you're wrong.  There are probably a lot of pros who do the same thing (I wouldn't know, since I'm pretty shy about friending the ones who have personal but not fan pages and I'm too Facebook-averse in the first place to spend a lot of time searching for "official" pages to follow), but I consider this kind of engagement above and beyond, especially from someone writing and drawing a ongoing series. 

Then I bought the Shade the Changing Man issues she penciled.  While I really dig Peter Milligan's work on X-Force/X-Statix (I consider this run flawless in every way), the story itself is mediocre by the standards of some of the other contemporaneous Vertigo titles and that supposedly edgy inking job doesn't do Doran's pencils any favors.  Then I bought the latest two issues of A Distant Soil.  Beautiful books, not sure what's happening in them because I've missed so much already, the Comixology guided view format isn't the best way to experience the story due to the way Doran designs pages.  That's no complaint about the book, because obviously you're meant to hold the actual paper thing in your hands and read it that way.

Taking all this together, with the release of this "definitive" edition of the first part of A Distant Soil it seems now is the time to crank things all the way back to the beginning and finally read something I believe I should have been reading all along.  This is the kind of thing that pleases me.  Something buzzing in the back of my mind, some recurring encounter with material and finally, when everything aligns, a chance to get into it in a major way right from the beginning.  Love and Rockets, Xenozoic Tales, Jack Kirby's Fourth World books, Creepy and Eerie magazines, Lone Wolf and Cub and now A Distant Soil.

So that's another one we'll be talking about here before much longer.  I'd have started with a little more today but I've only read a few pages.  Hey, I also bought the first year of The Amazing Spider-Man plus some later issues and I didn't even get to open them.  Something about jetlag and just not having enough time to do everything I'd like to do in a day!