Well, this was an experience! I'm still not sure how much I enjoyed 'The Compleat Moonshadow', a graphic novel in more than the usual sense, but I'm sure that it will absolutely stay with me as an overt example of the most interesting sort of book: a quintessentially personal creation that will stand forever apart from its peers as something unique.

Having worked my way through the majority of the graphic novels on my own shelves that looked interesting and didn't revolve around superheroes, I asked a friend with a magnificent collection of his own what he might recommend I read from it. Edward kindly lent me a stack that I'll happily work through over the coming months and insisted that I start with this one, as an unjustly out-of-print gem from one of his favourite comic book writers, John Marc DeMatteis. Now I can see why.

The term "graphic novel" has many meanings nowadays, the most common being a book made of comics. This is that, because it collects twelve issues of the 'Moonshadow' comic book and adds a later addition, a one-shot called 'Farewell, Moonshadow'. However, it feels like more of a graphic novel than most graphic novels because it's fundamentally a novel told in graphic form.

Everything about it screams literally. It's not just the quotes on the back cover suggesting that. It isn't merely its overt reverence for literary standards, quoting Blake, Yeats and Dostoyevsky and namechecking and citing an entire reading list of classics. It's also in the way that it's told rather than shown, as an incredibly wordy graphic novel featuring very little dialogue. Almost all of it is narrated, by the titular Moonshadow, who's a hundred and twenty years old and remembering a unique life that makes us question his sanity from the outset. As a memoir, it's philosophical in a Russian sense and speaks episodically to his awakening, a flowery way to say coming-of-age.

I'm still wildly unsure as to how much of this we're supposed to take as read, because what we see of the old Moonshadow suggests that he's entirely human and so is everyone else, but we depart from that on page one when he talks about his parents. There's been a long association between madness and the Moon, which is surely echoed in Moonshadow's very name and the depiction of his father as a bizarre celestial body. Sure, we could trust that he's a G'i-Doses, a celestial species of prankster gods that kidnap sentient beings to populate an intergalactic zoo that nobody visits, or we could see him as a giant laugh emoji, but I saw him as the Moon with a sardonic grin, or one more allusion to lunacy.

His mother is more traditional, a Jewish hippie chick from Brooklyn who ditches her birth name of Sheila Fay Bernbaum to become simply Sunflower and presumably fry her brain on acid. She's one of many kidnap victims of the G'i-Doses but she's the first to marry one and conceive a child of two species, however human he looks. That's Moonshadow, of course, and he grows up in the zoo, with his only companions his mother, her cat Frodo and a magic library. Oh, and his only friend, who's a professionally obnoxious bundle of fur in a hat by the name of Ira, who's like a giant abusive cigar smoking bear with only a mouth to show character. Well, occasionally eyes too, but mostly mouth.

You can see the problem taking this literally. Surely this is either allegory or surrealistic vision. In the early chapters, I wondered if Moonshadow was insane from the start or whether he isn't even real and his entire existence is only a manifestation of his mother's acid-drenched brain. Within a few parts of the twelve, I started to see Moonshadow as a summer of love take on Don Quixote, a sane man thinking back on an insane life, shaped as it was by a life dedicated to reading romantic fiction. Certainly, Don Moonshadow is outrageously naïve and he drifts through the stories of his life like an oblivious masochist, his mother a ghost, his father religiously absent and his friend an amalgam of everyone we've ever met.

While it's hard to say that I enjoyed this, I was absolutely drawn into following Moonshadow's trip through his memories. This is a long book, closer to five hundred pages than four but it plays out magnetically. While some of it dragged and I often ached for focus, I never wanted to stop turning pages. Even after I turned the final one, I felt like I'd lost something. For all that this is supposed to be an awakening, it was all about the journey to me, never the destination, and a good part of me wanted that journey to keep going forever.

Much of that is due to the art by Jon J. Muth, entirely in watercolours, which Wikipedia tells me is the first time this happened in American comic books. Of course, there's no citation so maybe that isn't the case, but it's certainly a graphic novel that relies on its art as much as its story. Part of it is due to the writing, because DeMatteis has quite the voice. He tells this in lyrical language, more like a poet than a novelist but with the stream of consciousness style of the beat generation. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs both spring quickly to mind.

However, for all the pretentious cultural references, this feels the product of a particularly broad array of influences. The G'i-Doses are straight out of Douglas Adams. There are early scenes that I found reminiscent of 'Alien', the features of Terry Gilliam and Kurt Vonnegut. If those are heady, I will happily add Dr. Seuss, the Keystone Kops and Alice in Wonderland. Fairy tales are important, with every part beginning 'Once upon a time'. The 'Don Quixote' mindset did fade as the book ran on but it never vanished, so Burroughs retelling Cervantes isn't an awful place to start. Our hero is certainly delusional, striding through a nonsense universe as if it always makes complete sense. With planets like Gimmegimme and Bingbangboom, it clearly doesn't.

The colourful characters echo that too, most of them able to be summed up by a single adjective. I liked evil Darkmeister Ebann and slimy Pobidiah Unkshuss as characters, even if I'd despise them in reality. There's also jolly Lord Gaylord, mad King Macha and tragic Lady Shady, among many more. They each have an archetypal part to play, as do a couple of books that become recurrent themes: 'We are All Ants in a Meaningless Cosmos' by Ragstone Phillit and especially 'The Gospel of Shree Quack-Quack H'onnka'. The most telling line may be this one: "He seemed mad as a hatter -- and I liked him immediately."

I think that sums up the book for me. I think I liked it, though I'm not quite sure. I certainly wanted to stay immersed in its madness, which says something. For all its references, it always felt like it's its own thing, something special and different. And maybe that's enough. After all, it's more than most books can claim, graphic novels or otherwise. Thanks, Edward! ~~ Hal C F Astell