Being afraid of the dark is one of those thing childish things we re supposed to put aside as we grow older.
After all, the idea that evil and terrible things lurk in the places where there is no light, where our view is limited or outright obscured, is surely just the product of overactive youthful imaginations, right?
The Stuff of Legend – Book 2: The Jungle by Mike Raight and Brian Smith with illustrations by Charles Paul Wilson III might make you think again.
The follow-up to Book 1: The Dark where the idea that those creeping, lurking horrors you feared in childhood, hiding in the shadows of cupboards, corner and under beds, might have some basis in fact was given, arrestingly chilling validity, Book 2: The Jungle deepens and continues the story to a wholly affecting degree.
In the first instalment, the artwork of which reenforces the idea that graphic novels can be as much art as anything else, it is the year 1944, and one lonely little boy finds himself forcibly taken from the relative safety of his toy room in Brooklyn to a place of nightmares and fantastically twisted Alice in Wonderland ruled by the hideously cruel Boogeyman.
He is not alone in this graphically black-and-white world, the autocratic ruler of which lurks in the darkness and shadows of a world where, yes, there is kindness and care if you look for it, and the being dispensing it is fearlessly brave, but where you are than likely to find dog-eat-dog opportunism and a pervasive fear of losing your life to the Boogyeman who abhors failure and punishes those who trangress him, willingly or not.
When the boy is taken, his loyal toys follow him, and battle to locate him in a strange new environment where they too are transformed and a cute teddy bear named Max is turned into a brutish-looking but still kind giant bear and his companions become either human and animal and very much able to be injured or to die.
The Stuff of Legend is very much Toy Story meets Stranger Things, an upside down place where lost and broken toys are seduced over with the idea that they can matter again, that they can have the vital purpose they once enjoyed when they were the centre of their much-loved child’s world.
But as Book 2: The Jungle dawns, and the toys from the boy’s playroom have suffered loss and injury and an unseen schism that could derail their noble attempts to rescue to whom they are more loyal than he is to them – that doesn’t make him cruel, simply a growing child whose passions and interests, and thus devotions to certain playthings is constantly evolving – it becomes agonisingly clear that what started out as an impulsive noble mission to rescue someone they love, is not bound to work out as wonderfully as the idealism of their intent, and that there are darker forces at work in them as much around them.
Replete with motifs about the futility and hell of war, and a pervasive sense of how a impelling need to be wanted and loved can be turned into something quite dark and terrible, Book 2: The Jungle is a film noir of dark desire, horrifyingly consequential mistakes and love lost and regret looming large.
The kidnapped boy features far more heavily in this instalment as he awakens in his brutish new surroundings and tries to make sense of a place where all the things he feared have form and substance and could do him very real harm.
While he is trying to find his way back home to his mother and what passes for security in the midst of World War Two, the toys, led by Max are trying to locate him, journeying from a ruined zoo where the potential death of their noble quest lurks to a jungle where refuge has been offered and found to a legion of animals who, unlike the toys, see people like the Boogeyman as nothing more than an existential threat to be vanquished.
Old-fashioned ideas of toys coming alive in a magical, playful way this is not, with The Stuff of Legend – Book 2: The Jungle invaded less by the idea that when we aren’t watching our toys are every bit as alive as we imagine them to be when we play with them than they are fallible and prone to bad decisions and terrible outcomes as the rest of us.
But for all the darkness and threat, all brought to vivid black-and-white life by the masterfully imaginative and evocative hands of artist Charles Paul Wilson III who creates a palpable of fantastically awful time and place, there is an uplifting sense of persevering and tenaciously hanging on to a dream even in the face of great danger.
Max and his friends, who might not be as cohesive as they thought and who fail every bit as much as they succeed, stick to their rashly arrived-at task, confronting all manner of horrors, inward and outward, as they try to rescue a boy who may not have shown them much loyalty of late but whom they love deep down in a way that lives and breathes and cannot be ignored.
It’s a powerful, muscular sense of love, loyalty and belonging, and it fills every page of this wondrously-realised volume of The Stuff of Legend where some quite sad and brutal things happen and where dreams are bashed and corrosively dented to the point of non-existence, but where some real beauty of the heart remains and where redemption may yet be found.
A story that feels like all the love and fears of our childhood made manifest, The Stuff of Legend – Book 2: The Jungle, released in 2011, is enthrallingly and movingly good, visually, narratively and in poetically arresting written form, a testament to how evil the world can be but more importantly, how great can be the love and commitment that stands against it, and which while challenged, may yet prevail again some fairly huge and terrifying odds.