“It is its own creature, a jarring and interruptive montage of mythology and colonial tropes cast across a fantastic universe with a nibling of a toe in history or geography; the remainder of Clarke’s attention is on speaking a truth or four about struggle and heart.”

There’s a lot to love about Hardears, if for no smaller reason than the storytelling tradition which has found its way into this book is fresh and needed. That said, know immediately that Hardears follows few of the expectations of either Western graphic novels or manga: it is its own creature, a jarring and interruptive montage of mythology and colonial tropes cast across a fantastic universe with a nibling of a toe in history or geography; the remainder of Clarke’s attention is on speaking a truth or four about struggle and heart.

So are our heroes worthy and noble? We barely have time to notice, but signs point to the irrelevancy of the question: they live. Is the villain diabolical and cunning? Perhaps. More important still, he is an experience barely contained by his own mask or flesh. And what of all the tertiary characters and factions (and there are many)? of the different spiritual and supernatural races which decorate the pages? They struggle and win or lose as history relates, the general tapestry of Caribbean folklore and identity.

Once I accepted that Hardears worked its own rules, I admit is was somewhat less difficult to roll with what it gave me: strange industries, inexplicable dreamscapes, ghost allies, magical cannon, all the rest. We sit around a graphic campfire, listening to the fantastic, and we worry less about coherence than washed by the experience. Is this a Caribbean version of Afrofuturism? Is this a patois of myth and folklore, a syncretic fusion of history and imagination? And is that a fusion of machine and plant? Is that a symbol of Ethiopian dynasty? And is that . . . ?

Clarke isn’t writing for me, of course. That Hardears finds its way to a larger audience is our fortune, but hardly his need.  For me and others more familiar with graphic tradition, the story is a smash-up, a rollicking abandon of explosions and juxtapositions, of references to past tales we either already breathe or accept implicitly by their hints. For me, while the challenge of reading Clarke’s story was welcome, I won’t pretend its speed and about-face logic and missed scenes made it easy. Still, still, that this exists, that literatures find and build their spaces quite apart from everything Global North readers have come to capitalize–that’s the pleasure.