The Boy Who Made Silence is the latest self-published comic to benefit from a Xeric Foundation grant. 

Joshua Hagler is an artist based in San Francisco.  And since the comics industry tends to be a bit hazy in its use of the word "artist", it may be worth spelling out that Hagler is an Artist artist, who makes paintings and exhibits them in galleries.  He's got an exhibition on at the moment in his home town, in fact.

Now, these are very different disciplines.  The ability to paint doesn't necessarily imply the ability to tell a story (let alone write one), or even the ability to work on the scale of a printed page.  But Hagler's debut issue is an impressive start.  The story is about a ten year old boy, Nester Gudfred, who loses his hearing in an accident.  Apparently the story as a whole involves him searching for his father and, in due course, for God.  Issue #1 is mainly about his reaction to losing his hearing.

It certainly looks beautiful.  Not only can Hagler paint, but he has the proper focus on telling the story.  It's subtle, understated work. And it's beautifully reproduced - the colours are rich and vibrant, in a way that makes everything else l've read this week look washed out and cheaply printed. 

Strictly speaking, not a great deal really happens.  But it doesn't need to, because this is all about the kid adapting to his deafness and experiencing banal events in a new way.  It works on a combination of quiet gestures and second-person narrative - a good choice, by the way, since it lets Hagler write his personalised internal monologue without having to do it in the style of a 10-year-old.

Quite how you get from this issue to a quest for God, I wouldn't want to guess.  To judge from his afterword, Hegler seems to be genuinely religious.  Now, obviously that's hardly unusual in the USA, but it's surprisingly rare to find anyone (outside the realms of demented pamphleteers) doing Christianity from that perspective in comics.  The writers at Vertigo do it to challenge religion or simply to play with a standard set of archetypes.  Otherwise, publishers tend to run shy of any religious overtones that might not be sufficiently inclusive.  In a shared universe, there are good reasons to remain vague; then again, the last time any Marvel Universe characters encountered God, He turned out to be Jack Kirby.

Now, I'm not American and I'm not religious either, but I have no problem with Christian art.  There's a proud western tradition of it, and there's no reason why the modern equivalent has to be dross like Left Behind.  Unfortunately, the prevailing fashions in high art mean that non-ironic belief has rather gone out of fashion.  It's a toxic subject for artworld types.  On his livejournal, Hagler reports that one San Francisco store refused to carry the book simply because God was mentioned in the afterword.  The mind boggles.

Quests for spiritual meaning are difficult to carry off at the best of times, and in the present climate audiences are less than receptive towards them.  They can easily come off as hokey.  It's too early to say whether Hegler can escape that trap, but this issue certainly doesn't seem hokey.  A very impressive start.

Rating: A

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