What can I say? I love the imaginative! That lies at the very core of why I was attracted to this project in the first place.
There are all kinds of different comic book projects on Kickstarter, at any given moment. Long has been the virtual parade of comic book projects to come down the pike. It's not everyday, though, that one gets treated to the visual delight that is
an ax-wielding log come to life.
Meet the hero and defender of the North Woods - meet Log.
I am a long time fan of the old Savage Sword of Conan and Conan magazines. The artwork on display for this Kickstarter project harkens back to those many tales of the most famous Cimmerian barbarian of all.
Log lights the fires of imagination that burn deep within me. This is a project that I yearn to back -
both heart and soul!
This comic book will feature this magnificent invention of the human mind - a log, as drawn by a variety of different artists and presented in story form, a variety of tales to regale the reader with the legends of Log.
Log is, I believe, the best thing to happen to trees since Treebeard in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
As a kid growing up, I fell in love with comic books at an early age. Now, all these many years later, I find that comic books still form solid entertainment. They are, after all, storytelling via a combination of visual and narrative modes.
Log is a literary work of value, one that is served up with a degree of seriousness, as befits this creature of which I know very little about.
But, that's part of what makes things like this fun - the finding out.
It's is a great thing, to me, for a story to beckon unto me, to attract my eye in the first place, and to make me crave more. Log accomplishes that. There's so much out there that doesn't appeal to me, at all, which makes Legends of Log all that more notable.
When I browse the Legends of Log project page on the Kickstarter website, my eye drowns in the visuals.
This kind of artistic eye-candy is addictive! The more that I see, the more that I want to see.
His mere presence on the page, alone, is more than sufficient for me to want to trek unto this place called the North Woods, that I might join Log in these tales, that I might get lost in the narrative that such fiction brings to life.
I think that this project creator knew exactly what he was doing, when he opted to not depict Log as a silly, humorous character. This character - this grand protector of the North Woods - deserved better than that.
And, he got it!
The end result of it all is that it is this serious treatment, itself, that makes me - as a reader - want to take this character and his legends seriously. It is one of the things that I think that this character has in common with Conan, as given to the world by sword and sorcery author Robert E. Howard.
How seriously can one take a living log, though?
At least as seriously as one can take any countless number of different characters that have appeared in tropes of fantasy writing down through the years.
Independent comic book creators always seem to reside somewhere between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They are a
mother lode of imaginative writing, and all too often, the world ends up not seeing what they have to offer us.
Legends of Log is something that I think deserves to see the light of day, which crowd funding can make possible. In simplest terms, I chose to back this project for the very simple reason that I fell in love with the character of Log at first sight.
One of Log's foes, the Worm of Doom, strikes me as a very Lovecraftian type of creature. Surely, H.P. Lovecraft would be proud.
Not because Legends of Log is a descent into horror of a mind-boggling level, but rather, because it somehow manages to expand the Lovecraftian mythos, indirectly.
That's a very gritty Log who is just about to face off against this Worm of Doom, over on the left hand side of this article. Each bit, each piece, each nugget, each morsel of literary invention taps into - and expands - the mythos.
Yet, the trap that author Dave Suharski managed to avoid was the error of trying to emulate or to duplicate any existing mythos. Suharski isn't trying to take the reader anywhere except someplace new. It's a place that harkens back unto other places, unto other legends, involving other characters.
Which probably accounts for why I find Log to be so refreshing a character.
Why a log? Perhaps that question is best answered by asking, instead, why not?
This defender of the North Woods isn't perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But, he seems to be hewn out of imagination of substance.
And that, my fine Kickstarter friend, is why I am Squatch Kicking the defender of the North Woods!
Log, consider yourself Squatch Kicked!
