Horizon: Book One - The Falling

  
Andrew Wildman has been an artist for a long time. Many of you will remember his work on Marvel's The Transformers (and more recently his new Transformers work for IDW), his pages for Spider-Man and Force Works, and his Frontier graphic novel. He's also worked as a designer, illustrator and storyboard artist. All of this experience has led Andrew to become an excellent sequential artist as his new self-published graphic novel Horizon superbly reveals.

Andrew funded Horizon through indiegogo, and Book One: The Falling is now available. The 52 page softback is an absorbing read. When I received my copy I intended just to read the first few pages and put it away for later, but I found myself captivated by the flow of the story and the intriguing plot. Before I knew it I'd completed the book. 

Horizon is the story of 15 year old Alisanne, a girl who feels out of place at home and at school, and the person she depended on the most, her father, is gone. Falling asleep (we assume) she awakes (or does she) in a world that's not quite right, with empty streets, dead ends and closed doors. Yet this is a place where answers can be found if Alisanne works it out. 

The story is part metaphor, part dream-interpretation, and deeper than it might seem on first reading. There are basic similarities to Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz but only in the initial setup. It's a fairly quick read, as Andrew uses a decompressed technique and the dialogue and narrative is minimal on many of the pages. Usually I'd feel short-changed by that but in the case of Horizon I really felt rewarded by the mysteries of the plot and by Andrew's superbly skillful artwork. It's a book that works on one level on the first reading, then also invites a second and third reading when you start guessing at the source of the narrative captions and the significance of other characters.

As I mentioned, this is only Book One, so we have to wait a while for the next chapter, but the story breaks at a place where we're sufficiently intrigued without it being a cliffhanger, so it works well. 

Horizon Book One: The Falling can be bought now directly from Andrew Wildman at this link: http://www.horizongraphicnovel.com/shop.html