From the Longbox – 2

Second in a series.  Today’s topic is short and sweet:

What the Hell Happened to Kilian Plunkett?

OK, so here’s the short answer: he went on to draw a bunch of Star Wars comics and character designs for animation.

But, before that he illustrated the Aliens: Labyrinth series, written by Jim Woodring.  (Yeah, you read that right, Jim Woodring of Frank and Jim.)  But before that, though, he did a book called The 8th Wonder for Dark Horse and when I ran across this going through my old comics, I remembered really liking it.  The story was originally serialized, I think, in Dark Horse Presents starting in maybe ’94 and then, once the series was complete, it was issued as a 24-page one-shot.

If The 8th Wonder had come out a few years later, it would certainly have been labeled “steampunk.”  In ’94, though, just four years after The Difference Engine came out, this wasn’t a term known to most folks other than SF enthusiasts.  Maybe I’m way off-base here, but I can’t think of an earlier example in comics of something that one could accurately call steampunk before 8th Wonder.  The hyper-detailed but largely unreadable comics series Steampunk would appear a few years later in 2000 and of course The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thereafter.

What neither of the above books, though, had was a visual style that really matched the feel of the story, and that’s part of what makes 8th Wonder such a good read.   This early incarnation of Plunkett, done just in black and white, shows a lighter, more fragile line, with spotted blacks applied mainly as color/design choice rather than as shading–both of which, when combined with some well-placed stippling, yield a very European “clear line” look that gives the book just the right combination of fragility and grit.