{"id":90,"date":"2008-08-31T00:01:22","date_gmt":"2008-08-31T04:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2022-12-14T14:22:55","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T19:22:55","slug":"fiction-clemens-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/fiction-clemens-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction Clemens<\/em> Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cEver have a moment that reminds ye of an old forgotten dream? But then maybe the dream were really the memory of a moment ye once lived?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

C<\/strong><\/span>hristian Olsen came up with the name \u201cFiction Clemens\u201d and asked his friend Josh Wagner to write a character around it. The character first appeared in The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe<\/em> along with Dune Trixie. After an attempt to make Fiction Clemens<\/em> into a movie \u2014 with a script that called for special effects that would be beyond the reach of most independent film crews \u2014 Fiction Clemens<\/em> became much more budget friendly three part comic.<\/p>\n

The comic series starts off with some intentionally corny humor that you can\u2019t help but laugh at. You get the feeling that there\u2019s a bigger world than just the events that are happening in the story. That there are a number of stories going on, some of which are alluded to but you don\u2019t quite see, and that the main plot that the story follows is just a part of it.<\/p>\n

The feature plot follows origin of the duo, Fiction Clemens and Dune Trixie, as they drift through the far out West of another planet. Fiction Clemens is accosted by Tiberius Kitchens, and is saved by Dune Trixie. On the run from Tiberius, Fiction and Dune Trixie don disguises. When Tiberius catches up to them, he mistakes Fiction for a woman, and is enraptured by \u201cher\u201d beauty and offers \u201cher\u201d a dowry of Spindle\u2019s Web, a cactus farm. Meanwhile, the elder Kitchens is buying up all the land, so that he can corner the market on toothpicks, and unfortunately Spindle\u2019s Web, which his son has just given away, figures prominently in his plans. The remainder of the plot deals with the consequences, as Tiberius hunts down Fiction Clemens and Dune Trixie, the elder Kitchens tries to corner the toothpick market, and everyone discovers in the end that what they wanted really isn\u2019t what they wanted (for good and for ill).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The artist, Joiton<\/a> does a wonderful job of capturing the story in a style that reminded me of a mixture of The Maxx<\/em>, The Nightmare Before Christmas<\/em>, and Edvard Munch\u2019s The Scream<\/em>. The best part of Fiction Clemens<\/em> isn\u2019t the artwork, or the plot, or the characters (which are quite good). No, the best part of Fiction Clemens<\/em> is actually the craft with which the story is told. It was a poem. There seemed to be an underlying discipline to the way that the story was being told, much in the same way that a haiku or a couplet has a formal structure, and yet an infinite variety of stories can be told in them. It can be summed up in the following panel, from issue #3:<\/p>\n

\"Imagine<\/p>\n

If I could compare the story structure to anything it would be gravity. Too often I\u2019ve seen stories where the characters are pulled along by the events outside of their control. While it\u2019s easy to see how events in Fiction Clemens<\/em> lead up to the climax, at no time do you feel that the characters are locked into their fate. While some stories inevitably crash (and burn) Fiction Clemens<\/em> traces a lazy orbit that eventually spirals the scope of the story out, far from the point of origin.<\/p>\n

This can be seen especially in the issue #2. The story starts with Fiction passed out on the ground and Dune Trixie calling for help. The story then back tracks to the events leading up to that point, but, just like a spiral, although it returns to the same point it places you further along in the story.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The same can be said for the series as a whole. It ends in the same place where it begins, and yet leaves you further along in the story. Well done!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If you like Space Westerns then you should give Fiction Clemens<\/em> a look. All three issues are in stores now. You can find more information about Fiction Clemens<\/em> at the Fiction Clemens website<\/a> or the Ape Entertainment website<\/a><\/u>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ape Entertainment<\/a> brings us Josh Wagner’s Fiction Clemens<\/em> (sub-titled Adventures of a Zen Space Cowboy<\/em>), a Space Western tale about the inexorable spiral of living. — ed, N.E. Lilly<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,13],"tags":[131,129,130],"media":[299],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1588,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions\/1588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"media","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}