Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
You don’t need to look any further for a magnificent read when it comes to a series of graphic novels than Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key.
It is a series built upon the very fundamentals of great story telling that art can only ever enhance. The premise of a unique story, the realisation that you care about the way each character is drawn from the writer’s imagination and lovingly captured by the artist, the pace of the narrative, whether it is fast or slow doesn’t matter and the action and thoughts drawing you ever deeper into their own world, blurring the lines between narrative symbolism and the representation of Humanity’s great assets, that of the overwhelming power of vision, inspiration and creativity.
In the fourth book of the Locke & Key series, Keys To The Kingdom, the distorting nature between fantasy and reality is taken even further due to the nature of Bode, the youngest of the Locke children, and his own incredible, fertile imagination. From the very beginning of Keys To The Kingdom, the reader is confronted by the muddling and yet honest approach of some of the frames, the imagination of a young boy going at full speed and the realisation that the drawing are a huge nod to the idea that Bill Watterson, arguably the creator of the funniest cartoon series to ever come out of America, the great Calvin and Hobbes, had to let an adult remember what it was like to be a small child again and have the freedom to relish in a world they can create to their own image whilst acknowledging the responsibility of their actions in that world.
The child like Rufus, damaged by his mother’s association with the Zack/Dodge/Lucas Caravaggio/Black Lady entity typifies alongside Bode, the need for responsibility within the world of illogical mayhem in imagination. The grief he shows to the loss of his favourite soldier in Zack’s rage touches a nerve within all of us, it is the response to the allusion of his father being in the American services at a time when they perhaps have never been on more high alert and the very real sorrow of not being able to see him which frames both Bode’s mostly enjoyable experiences in his head and the regret in Rufus’ own dark mind.
As children our imaginations are allowed to run riot, in adulthood they are perhaps called delusions, fantasies in which many seem to take an absurd delight in knocking and dismantling. The fragments that stay alive leading to trying to recapture them in any way possible, whether through the act of taking drugs or turning to drink or through ill-timed or mistaken love. All these themes of the death of imagination are explored greatly in Keys To The Kingdom, from the matriarch of the family Nina Locke and her slightly off camera acknowledgment that drink has taken her down a dark path, Tyler falling for the wrong girl and suffering for the pain of betrayal and rejection and the wonderful character of Erin Voss, a black lady who spends her days in a diminishing fog of thought at one of the homes in Lovecraft, her untold hatred and distrust of the white population perhaps the most saddest of all. Her mind a near complete white out, not even fragments of imagination able to penetrate beyond the shell of what was once human.
Joe Hill is one of those rare beings that can scare the pants off you with just a single line, Gabriel Rodriguez, with the gift of a cerebral magician, manages to take you further into your own dark imagination than you ever thought possible. Two people that you could spend an entire day with but knowing full when the night comes, when the demons they possess, that gnaw and hammer at the disturbed world around them, it’s time to let the magic take control.
Imagination will always flourish where it is needed most, to keep adults in perhaps in touch with their souls.
Locke & Key: Keys To The Kingdom is available to purchase from Worlds Apart, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall