Comic review: Neverboy #3- Transcendent

Story: Shaun Simon
Art: Tyler Jenkins
Colours: Kelly Fitzpatrick
Cover art: Conor Nolan
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 6th May 2015


There are two full-page panels* of beautiful artwork in Neverboy #3, and after you experience them it’s quite easy to forget that you’ve just been reading a beautifully complex, subtle, intelligent and emotionally engaging comic book narrative as well.

Neverboy #3 has a feel of philosophy about it, that feeling of concepts that you can almost touch, but try as you might they always seem tantalising near, yet just out of reach. I really do enjoy the book. It’s one of those books that I read over and over again.

I take my time with it because I know it’s good, and I want to understand why it’s good. I want to deconstruct it, like you are supposed to do if you are a proper comic book reviewer, or even if you are just a bloke reviewing a comic book for his Internet blog.

I like how the story lets you make your own mind up about it, that’s probably the key. I like how it lays itself open. It’s not telling you what to think. It just wants you to engage, in your own way, to make of it what you like. That’s rare in comic books, a book that invites contemplation, doesn’t preach and doesn’t tell you what is right, what is wrong, what is real, what is fantasy.

It’s a floaty book with floaty art, and I love it. It’s arty, but good arty, if you know what I mean. There’s no snobbishness to it. It’s just plain and simple good.

There are two moments that stand-out to me about issue #3, the first is the moment when the artist character reveals his painting, the masterpiece that shows he is back on form, full of new inspiration and ready to go. That’s a difficult thing to do as the painting is shown in a full-page panel, and it has to be good, really good, to work within the narrative.

You can’t talk about a writer regaining his creative muse and then show a blah example of his work that is supposed to be great, can you? What you need is something that is actually really very good, and guess what? That’s what they have here in this book, a full page painting of a diner with two space alien type creatures emerging from it’s Dr Who Tardis like front door, and it looks absolutely superb. I want it framed. I want it on my wall. I want to spend money on it and enjoy it every single time I walk into my living room.

The second moment is when a group of women talk about their life motivations. They openly admit that they live for material concerns, for shopping, for a house, a car, the status, the shoes, the plastic surgery. It’s all empty physicality, appearance, that idea that we are animals, that you get what you can because death lasts forever, and there is no heaven.

That Satanic (and that’s what real Satanism actually is, the belief in nothing but the animal self) is the dominant mind-set of our age. To see it expressed here by a group of pretty young rich ladies seems awfully real, and it’s the contrast with the mind-set of the artist, of the fantasy dreamer that puts a sharp edge to that awful contrast that is a real as real gets. 

Neverboy is fantasy, but fantasy on the edge of brutal reality, and to see the juxtaposition between the fakery of flesh, ego, materialism and status, and that which comes from the pure joy of the creative process is quite a jolt. It forces you into the realisation that there is a truth transcendent from the material status of the self, and that happiness does not come from a thing, it comes from within.

Neverboy #3 then continues the excellence exhibited in the first two issues of the title. I’ve attempted to get to the core of why it works here, but I really cannot do it justice with words alone. Buy the book, read it slowly, enjoy it, then do it all over again.


Rating: 10/10 (Transcendent)

* The first panel is in the main narrative of the text and is by main artist Tyler Jenkins. The second full-page panel of beautiful artwork comes after the conclusion of the story and is by Taylan Kurtulus.