The Cautioner's Tale

The Cautioner’s Tale was not a comic book like I was expecting, but a simulation of a journal, with a strong nod to the Victorian epistolary tradition.  Something about all the toxins and metal pieces reminded me of some sort of steam punk reality, and there are many letters, something you would find in many Victorian novels since letter writing was the texting of the day.  It’s not consistent in its form as a journal or diary, along side the newspaper clippings and bits of paper are bottles, signs, and large boxes, gracing the page as if they could be tucked into the physical book along with the paper pages.  If it was important enough, it found its way on the page.  I suppose this makes it less of a journal, but it did fill it with more of the things the main character is seeing and investigating.     

            I found the world building of this story interesting, it draws strong parallels to our world and references very clearly certain current events, but it is still a bit different from our world.  The references to food quality hit me the most.  A restaurant with “poison” in the name and fish in a river that no one in their right mind would eat.  I think this made the world the most real for me, the very low qualities of food and living standards expected from the world and institutions around the characters is sad.  Other devices are a bit heavy handed, like the voting ballot with only one option on it, or the names of the characters that are evil, they’re always full of undesirable words.  But despite never getting much of a full description of the world, I did feel very grounded in it.  Maybe there are a lot of dystopias being made right now, but it felt vivid and real to me.

            The visual style gave us documents and images to examine and get the feel of what the character is collecting and experiencing, but it lacks the visual depth and complexity of a comic book.  The buttons come up very soon and are fairly obvious.  The clues are explained as she receives them, there isn’t much mystery to them.  In looking at the text you can see if it’s supposed to be from a newspaper, a receipt, an official letter, or a scrap of a note added in later.  This gives us knowledge about what’s private and public knowledge, also how risky the information is or what its physically been through to get to the main character, but it doesn’t provide visual poetry or the ability to let our eyes wander and discover new things about the story. 

            Since the entries are written after the main character has already experienced something dangerous or enlightening, the entries feel more like summaries of the past.  We are removed from the action and told what happened by the character, leaving the power of the events a bit flat.  It felt less emotional, I was never anxious that the main character might not make it or had met their match, since almost every entry ends with them resolving the issue they brought up at the beginning.  It’s difficult to keep tension in this format, everything feels like it’s already over and decided, and since the main character is bringing everything to us, we just wait for the next bit of information.  It felt like the character explained what they were trying to figure out and then the clues just appeared, “…I did not expect such blatant confirmation of my path forward as what I received from reading the scholar’s words.”  (Wilburn).  I felt this happened a lot.  Clues, hints, and new leads appearing whenever the story needed them to.  Most of the entries didn’t resemble scenes, and so I did get tired of the same kind of set up to move the plot along.  How she solves the clues is usually remembering an old code she developed years before, so her cleverness or her ability to solve a problem or clue is lost on us.  There’s little creativity or interesting thought that goes into solving the problems presented, making each discovery seem easy.           

-Iris