Had a stroke of luck last week. The weather has been occasionally amazing in Brooklyn recently (especially today, which works out nicely as I’m going to my first Mets game of the year – first trip to Citi Field, which I’m approaching with trepidation). Walking home from the park last Saturday, Ginny, Nina and I popped briefly into the excellent, new comics shop Bergen Street Comics. It’s an understated bookstore-feeling place that sells lots of indies and minis, but is not too pretentious as to not to offer lots of single issues of Marvel and DC titles (although, I won’t pretend that I have any street cred and act like I buy super hero comics or appreciate reprints of late seventies Jack Kirby stuff work or get excited about the work of John Severin, etc.) Anyway, we met a guy in there who happened to be from Georgia, and had lived down in Athens and drew comics – so we had a lot to talk about.  His name is Joshua Ray Stephens and he was there dropping off his excellent self-published graphic novel The Moth or the Flame. I’m writing this to spread the word – this book is funny; it’s difficult; it feels good in your hands; it looks like some other comics; it reads like no other comic; you should buy it and read it if you feel like reading a book that is challenging the medium (without shattering the existing paradigms).

Stephens’s book is funny, presented with a polite introduction and the suggestion of a light, Noel Coward-esque parlor comedy.  Of course, once the teacup-headed Tempest, debonair playboy and huntsman, slays a mythical beast who begs for mercy, we see that this book is something much more desperate.  It is largely a love story; one the portrays the consumption of passion between two people and the inevitable violence and tragedy contained within this bind.  The characters frolic and resist each other and Stephens’s library of symbols that appear boldly throughout the panels of this book.  This book requires several reads, and there will still be questions, but the experience is well worth it.