by Daniel Casey

What does the modern, global explorer look like? What does it mean to combine the information age of the 21st century with the pulp adventurers of the 20th century? “What would Indiana Jones be like if created in 2014? What’s after Lara Croft?” These are questions from comic book writer Joe Keatinge, and they wonderful and demand a response. Along with artist Leila Del Duca, Keatinge is answering these questions in the new Image Comics title, Shutter.

Shutter is the story of Kate Kristopher (perhaps a slight hint to the patron saint of travelers, St. Christopher, who you can learn all you need to from the Tom Waits song Hang On St. Christopher), the heir of a family of explorers and adventurers. According to Kate’s father as he initiates his eight year-old daughter into family trade, the Kristophers have “long unlocked our reality’s never-ending secrets, chronicled her unyielding beauty.” Kate’s response is delightfully banal and precocious, “Do I have to?”

It’s a familiar childish response, revealing Shutter’s main conflict: familial obligation. “When people ask for more details,” Del Duca has said, “I usually say it’s ultimately about family… how we adopt people into our lives and how we deal with blood relatives we don’t want.” After the initial exposition about the Kristopher legacy, the story picks up with Kate, twenty years later. She has become a famed explorer, just as she was meant to, but we enter Kate’s life after she has given up the family trade. No longer an explorer, she’s a young woman trying to find an identity other than as a Kristopher adventurer. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for Kate, leaving behind her family legacy is no small task.

As issue one closes, Kate is attacked while visiting her father’s grave. In the course of the melee, Kate’s would-be kidnappers reveal that Kate has some dangerous siblings, who have apparently taken out a bounty on her. Simple, sudden action in the writing catapults us through this world at a dizzying pace. Readers can absorb on the action with relative ease, however, due to the Del Duca’s artistry. She creates a vibrant and deep world; one that is more than mere background for a tight, flowing narrative.

Shutter inhabits an alternate universe populated by aliens, zeppelins, golden eagle taxis, pterodactyls, and a subway graffiti’d as banal as any (Minotaur businessmen and commuting astronauts). There is no need to explain the world, we are able to see it and synthesize it almost immediately.

This synthesis is especially important given that the second issue picks up in the middle of harrowing action, involving a steam-punk robot Burl Ives snowman, ghost ninjas, a gang of lions dressed as 1930s era gangsters, a triumvirate of humanoid rat technicians (each wearing a different color cloak leaving them resembling the good fairies of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty), and some flying saucers care of New York’s finest.

As capricious as this might sound, the Keatinge and Del Duca weave everything together in such a way your only reaction is, “Of course.” Any story that can so deftly and immediately ingratiate its readership to this world deserves attention.

Far from being merely whimsical and visually entertaining, Shutter’s narrative also contains depth and complexity. When we retrun to Kate towards the end of issue two, we find a woman desperate for normalcy, sipping a calming glass of wine with her best friend, while being waited on by their excessively sanguine and eager to please Fritz the Cat-esque robot. The repreive allows Kate to view prior incidents as random rather than a deliberate attack. This attitude speaks to Kate’s past, fighting alligator men and a Cthulhu-like creature, but also to her desire to leave that past behind. It also suggests her capacity to block the revelation that she has previously unknown siblings.

Perhaps the aspect of Shutter that I enjoy the most is the modified Telemachus story. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, spent Homer’s epic searching for his sea-faring father. Stories about a son searching for his father are common, but rare are stories told of a daughter searching for her father. Kate isn’t estranged from her father, but she has just discovered that there is an aspect of him (and therefore herself) he has always hidden from her. In this light, I realized, Shutter is a motherless story.

There is no mother, or even a mother figure, in Shutter. The only hints we have of Kate’s mother are her father’s awkward deflections of her childhood desire for a sibling: “I want to give you everything you could ever wish for but…I just—I can’t right now, okay? All I can do is ask you to trust me here—that it’s better this way. That you and I are all we need. That nothing—no one—in this world could ever hope to match you,” and an obscure, malevolent looking woman who from a distance murders all but one of the captured lion gang that apparently she had hired to collect Kate. This nameless woman obviously has some machinations underway, but so far we can only speculate.

The brilliance of Shutter is this speculation coupled with Keatinge and Del Duca’s unique, realized characterization. Kate Kristopher is not a damsel; she is not merely a masculine hero made into a heroine; and she is no simple cliché or stereotype of the kind that too often fills the pages of modern comics. Their story is not a search for treasure or romance. Shutter is a story over and above that. Kate’s narrative is wholly her own, a story about a woman defining herself.

Daniel Casey created the poetry and fiction book review Gently Read Literature and has written on North American soccer for several sites. Daniel came around to comics when he was 37 years old. His rambling and grumbling can be followed on Twitter @misanthropester

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