Far Arden

AUTHOR: Cannon, Kevin

ARTIST: Kevin Cannon (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Top Shelf Productions

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2006-2008

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2008 (self-published edition); 2009

Publication History

Far Arden began as a dare between Kevin Cannon and fellow Minneapolis cartoonist Steve Stwalley. Cartoonists in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cannon’s birthplace and home, annually celebrate 24-Hour Comics Day, an event started by Scott McCloud in which creators write and draw a twenty-four-page comic in only twenty-four hours. After the event, Stwalley challenged Cannon to do a twenty-four-hour comic once a month for an entire year, which resulted in a 288-page graphic novel.

Under the guidelines of the twenty-four-hour comic, creators cannot work on the project before the event begins; they are not even supposed to think about plot or characters. Cannon mostly obeyed these rules, starting the comic without a clear plot, but he decided on certain elements beforehand. As Cannon described in a short comic explaining the origin of the book, he had a vague preliminary idea of the story: “A crusty sea dog named Army Shanks searches for a mythical tropical island in the middle of the Canadian High Arctic.” For the first four months he followed the terms of the bet exactly, producing twenty-four pages in a twenty-four-hour period once a month. After this point, Cannon started writing and drawing at a more regular pace, creating chapters longer than twenty-four pages. Cannon serialized the chapters online as he finished them. He completed Far Arden in the spring of 2008 and printed one hundred copies, selling them through his Web site and at conventions. (This first, self-published edition features an introduction by Stwalley.) Top Shelf Productions picked up the book and published its edition in 2009.

Plot

Although Far Arden is meant to be a single-volume graphic novel, it was originally created and serialized online as individual chapters. Because of the circumstances of the story’s creation, much of the plot was developed spontaneously, with characters and plot points introduced almost at random, sometimes making the story difficult to follow. The basic plot involves the search for the mythical Far Arden, a tropical island somewhere in the Canadian high Arctic.

The story begins with Armitage (Army) Shanks and his partner, Hafley, attempting to steal back their ship, the Areopagitica. They make their way to the ship, only to confront Fortuna and her partner, Pinho, who capture Hafley. Army is forced to flee, along with Alistair Cavendish, a young orphan who appears on the dock. While they escape, Army and Alistair reveal their goals to one another: Army hopes to find Far Arden with the help of something on board the Areopagitica, while Alistair wants to get revenge on the man who killed his father. The two are soon joined by college students David and Amber.

Afterward, the plot takes rapid twists and turns, as characters join and separate, forming temporary alliances only to split up again. Eventually the backstory is revealed: Army, Barty, Pinho, and Emile Bessehl were all college students together under professor Simon Arctavius. The five of them formed a club dedicated to finding Far Arden. Arctavius eventually devised a map to the island, but only shared it with Army, who carved it into the wood of the Areopagitica. Arctavius sailed to the island alone and never returned. Army was supposed to follow, but he was distracted by his romance with Fortuna and never left. David is revealed to have been working for Bessehl, who is still obsessed with finding the island. Bessehl eventually kidnaps Army and tries to use a “Death MRI” to read the map from Army’s brain. David saves Army, though Amber dies as the machine’s first test.

Finally, David, Fortuna, Alistair, and Army join together. The Areopagitica is destroyed, along with the map, but by sheer chance, the four happen to see the fabled gold-colored narwhal that leads the way to Far Arden. Upon reaching the island, David, Fortuna, and Alistair leave Army to recuperate in the boat while they travel to the crater at the top. There they discover a lush tropical paradise and are reunited with friends they believed lost. Meanwhile, Army is finally reunited with Arctavius, who appears on the boat out of nowhere. However, when Army puts on his oxygen mask, Arctavius disappears. Army goes up to the crater where he sees a barren wasteland with corpses surrounding a fuming vent. Army drags his companions back to the boat—discovering along the way the mummified corpse of Arctavius.

In the epilogue, it is revealed that Far Arden is actually a myth: The island naturally produces hallucinogenic vapors that make it seem like a tropical jungle. Army survived thanks to his oxygen mask, but the rest have all died. Ultimately, Army has fulfilled his mentor’s dream and found Far Arden but at the cost of many lives. He is left friendless, alone, and with nothing to show for his efforts.

Characters

•Armitage Shanks, a.k.a. Army Shanks, the protagonist, is a crusty sea captain with permanent stubble and opaque glasses (which he never removes). His clothes are based on those worn by explorers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. Though Shanks is shown to be misanthropic and cynical, he is loyal to those he considers his friends. Cannon deliberately left much of Army’s backstory vague so that he could explore it in further stories.

•Emile Bessehl, Army’s former classmate, is the closest the book has to an antagonist. A bearded, cigarette-smoking professor at (fictional) Boothia College, Bessehl is obsessed with discovering Far Arden and was enraged when Arctavius preferred Army as a protégé. He is based on Emil Bessels, a ship’s physician on a nineteenth-century polar expedition who poisoned and killed his captain.

•Hafley is Army’s closest friend and confidant. At the beginning of the book, the two are working together to take back the Areopagitica. How Hafley and Army became friends and partners is not shown in the course of Far Arden, as Cannon hopes to cover this in a later story.

•David is a student at Boothia College and the boyfriend of Amber. Although he appears to have been dragged along on the search for Far Arden by Amber, he is actually working for Bessehl.

•Amber is another Boothia College student. She has been fed stories of Army’s bravery and David’s heroism (working for Bessehl). When she is given a letter from Arctavius for Army—really a forgery crafted by Bessehl—she sets off to find Army.

•Fortuna is a former lover of Army, a thin blond femme fatale who seems to be coldly using Army in order to find Far Arden but who secretly still loves him. She is revealed to be Alistair’s long-absent biological mother.

•Alistair Cavendish is an orphan who gets pulled into Army’s adventures and the search for Far Arden. He is searching for the man who killed his father three years previously. At first he is told that Army killed his father, but he later discovers the truth: Army is his biological father’s brother. Alistair’s biological father was murdered by his foster father, whom Army killed in revenge.

Artistic Style

Cannon’s style is cartoony: Facial features are simple and clear, and backgrounds are drawn with just enough detail to identify the location. This is especially notable in action sequences: When characters throw punches, their arms often turn into elongated curves and arcs. Cannon specifically credits Peter Bagge’s style for this noodle-limbed aspect of his own art. The simplicity of figures and backgrounds is partly because pages had to be completed quickly, according to the rules of 24-Hour Comics Day, but even after Cannon stopped producing chapters in twenty-four-hour periods, his style remained largely consistent.

Far Arden is illustrated in black-and-white pen. Rather than use grayscale, all shading is done with cross-hatching. There are also no digital effects, nor was any part of the book produced using a computer; even the lettering is hand-done. Again, this is partly because of Cannon’s original time constraints, which did not give him time to go back over his work with a computer. This hand-drawn style gives an antique feeling to the book, similar to wood-block prints or old newspaper illustrations.

The sound effects in Far Arden are a notable feature of the book. Rather than being onomatopoetic—trying to imitate the sound of an action—they are often just literal descriptions of an action. Someone tossing aside an object is accompanied by the sound effect “cast aside”; punching through a window produces the sound “breakthrough”; and two people shaking hands is illustrated with “handshake!” These overly literal sound effects are used humorously throughout the book.

Themes

Far Arden is largely a story about exploration. In interviews, Cannon has described his interest in the age of polar exploration and how this influenced the book. The search for Far Arden is similar in many ways to these expeditions: the journey into unexplored territory, the struggle to survive in harsh conditions, the desire to discover the unknown. Some of these allusions are more specific. For example, Fortuna’s last words to Shanks are the last words of Titus Oates, a member of the doomed British Antarctic Expedition of 1910, who sacrificed himself in the hope that the other members of the party would live.

In alluding to this period, Cannon is also making a point about the dangers of exploration—not just the physical dangers of extreme weather and rough terrain but also the mental danger of self-delusion. The explorers who mapped the Antarctic went out in search of glory; they found only a barren, inhospitable wasteland, and many died in the process. Similarly, characters search for Far Arden in the belief that it will bring them happiness: Bessehl is obsessed with finding the last remaining blank spot on the map; Barty wants to exploit Far Arden for the Canadian government; even Alistair hopes to finally find happiness and love in this mystical island. Ironically, Shanks is the only person not actually searching for Far Arden—he is only looking for his mentor, Simon Arctavius—yet he is the only one who sees the island and lives.

The name of the island comes from a song by Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors: “I’ll always be true / Never go out, sneaking out on you, babe / If you’ll only show me Far Arden again.” In searching for Far Arden, characters end up losing their friends, their careers, even their lives. In the end, the island itself is a deathtrap with nothing of value. The ultimate theme of Far Arden, then, is that exploration can be a self-destructive process in which people find the thing they seek but end up losing everything else that they value.

Impact

Far Arden is a strong debut work that has received high critical acclaim. In 2010, it was nominated for an Eisner Award in the Best Publication for Teens category, though it lost to Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden. Far Arden is not Cannon’s first solo work; he created several strips for his college newspaper, one of which, Johnny Cavalier, has been collected. However, since then, most of Cannon’s work has been either as a commercial, work-for-hire artist or as an assistant to his business partner Zander Cannon (no relation) as part of their studio Big Time Attic.

Far Arden is notable for the unique nature of its creation. As a multichapter work made up of twenty-hour comics, it was made both spontaneously and gradually over the course of eighteen months. Also, the book is one of the first to be made available for free online while still being sold in print, and it has had strong sales. It may become a model for future graphic novel distribution.

Further Reading

O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim (2004-2010).

Renier, Aaron. The Unsinkable Walker Bean (2010).

Weing, Drew. Set to Sea (2010).

Bibliography

Aamodt, Britt. Superheroes, Strip Artists, and Talking Animals: Minnesota’s Contemporary Cartoonists. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011.

Cannon, Kevin. “CR Sunday Interview: Kevin Cannon.” Interview with Tom Spurgeon. The Comics Reporter, June 21, 2009. http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr‗sunday‗interview‗kevin‗cannon.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Kevin Cannon Talks T-Minus and Far Arden.” Interview with Alex Dueben. Comic Book Resources, June 9, 2009. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21527.

Hogan, John. “Cannon Fodder.” Graphic Novel Reporter. http://graphicnovelreporter.com/content/cannon-fodder-interview.