S.I.R. #1-5

We tell ourselves stories, in good times and bad. That never stops being important.

I’ve mulled over today’s book, the recent series S.I.R., quite a bit, as I’ve ruminated on the future of the republic. It strikes me a remarkably timely book, finger right on the pulse. Not trying to be heavy, oh, gosh no, quite the opposite. It’s a light and frothy thing, in places, alternating with sequences of vehicular mayhem. Actually, the premise seems enormously commercial, in 2025: preppies vs. scholarship kids on motorcycles. Oh and it’s yuri.

Excuse me, the Kool-Aid Man just burst through the wall. We watch yuri together. Guys (ironic), I’m sorry, but: I really like yuri. I cannot tell a lie. Disqualifying? Possibly.

Anyway. S.I.R.! This is a great book, full stop. It works in a great part because it finds itself in pursuit of the central question of our time, in a rather bald-faced assault, completely textual. Right there in the premise: this is a book about watching rich people eat shit. Just getting absolutely dunked on for clowns. No pretext whatsoever about the fact that every generic rich villain is a bumbling oaf because there’s no downward pressure pushing them to be anything more. They can settle at the level of uneducated boor. But they can’t then act surprised when someone from outside the club joins the party and absolutely dominates.

Heavy handed? Sure. It works because it’s a YA yuri about a fictional motorsport that would probably be fatal for anyone who actually tried it in the real world. I mean, they did this in the Middle Ages. People died, rather famously. Perhaps it’s just down to good padding. Anyway, the plot is just there to hang the character’s shirts on between pining and fighting. It just so happens that the plot really fucking hates rich people and if that’s not the spirit of the age I don’t know what the hell is.

The person behind the strip works under the name Fell Hound. (Or at least I assume that’s a pseudonym, she could just have been enormously lucky.) My first exposure to her work was the previews for S.I.R., which struck me as quite decent, with an air of something that could maybe be better than decent. The covers for the five issues are all remarkable pieces of work, compositions of no small ambition.

As is the story itself, it aspires to a great deal within in its remit – it’s a story about school, in a tertiary way, but also a story about motorcycles and violent motorsport. It is most pressingly a story of class. With all that on its mind the book does a good job being about itself. It zips along. If anything, it might have stood to linger on the romance a bit more. It comes courtesy of Boom’s subsidiary label, Boom Box!, an imprint seemingly devoted to material designed to compete with popular commercial genres outside the direct market, or even this country. S.I.R. is technically a sports story, albeit for an imaginary sport. Another to come down the pike recently from the same publisher, an ongoing called I Heart Skull-Crusher!, from the team of Josie Campbell and Alessio Zonno. More of a sci-fi twist, but another story shaped around the contours of athletic competition and female ambition, rare enough sensations across the American comic book industry. That should tell you the direction in which the imprint tends.

It pleases me to reward creators who I see doing things differently and actively stretching on the page. The fifth issue of the comic is drawn better than the first, which tells me the experience was educational. I hope the book finds an audience because I’d like to see more in this setting, if the author is of a mind. If not, that’s fine too. But I’m enjoying watching her learn on the page and hope to see more soon.

Now, I want to stress, the plot is fairly familiar. Bohemians vs. preps has been a standard setup across the sum of human history, not just a bunch of movies that were popular in the 1980s. Go back to Greek myth: anytime a human possesses any sort of skill whatsoever, if they’re any good at anything, they make of themselves an instant target for the wrath of the gods. Are you by chance good at weaving? Can you say that into my lapel, please? But the setup here works because there’s a lot else going on as well. A romance lies at the center of the story, though the main characters are estranged for the large part of it. The central action revolves around the fictional sport of motorcycle jousting, the traditional pastime of a fancy school with institutional ties to the motorcycle industry. If you’re curious, the titular acronym stands for, “Seismic Ironclash Roulette.” The players style themselves as warriors of medieval or classical character.

Into this pap smear of idle wealth steps a scholarship student named Nico. If the major players in S.I.R. are largely scions of wealth, her family owns a shop that sells and fixes motorcycles. The league ceases to be fun the moment it’s not a bunch of people all around more or less the same level of athletic ability throwing around moderate amounts of rich people money. Nico was practically born on the back of a bike, so of course she rides circles around a group of competent duffers. It’s actually a pretty common story, especially in American history: everything’s fun and games until a real baller shows up, then old money loses its shit. Oh and it’s often preamble to a race panic, too. Anyway. Complications arise after Avery, Nico’s lover of not-so-long-ago, shows up at the college and accidentally snakes Nico out of her perfect streak in the arena. Oops!

That’s the first issue, more or less, and away they go. Like I say, it unfolds with clockwork precision. The lovers are kept at odds as Avery is forced to take Nico’s place and work her own way up the ladder of the S.I.R. The main conflict with the boss of the league is resolved in a fashion that might kindly be described as pat – with a bureaucratic revelation about the bad guy’s status, eh. Motorcycle action unfolds in a much more convincing fashion. The book is strongest in the arena. A motorcycle is a hard thing to build a strip around, though there have certainly been many of them. You can never go wrong foregrounding the vehicle in a motorhead strip, that’s just common sense.

The book comes alive in the pomp of the motorcycle league, characters in painted armor going by handles like “Sir Ares” and “Sir Valkyrie.” The sport itself feels like a fecund setting for future stories. It’s fun stuff. Does she completely pull off what is, in absolute candor, a punishing mechanical challenge for any commercial artist? Like I say, the book gets better as it goes. Fell Hound is still a very young artist, with only a handful of credits to her name, primarily featuring a character named Commander Rao that saw print for Scout Comics. She’s still at the very beginning of a career, but the enthusiasm with which she tackled the challenge of her first series – well, that’s infectious. It pulls you right along. That’s three-quarters of the challenge right there. With that in mind S.I.R. looks like a strong down payment on a career to come.

Make no mistake, I think Fell Hound could well prove a creator of significance. This story feels contemporary. It exists in the same continuum as the most popular entertainment imported from Japan, meaning in 2025 it aspires to an American audience outside the borders of the Direct Market. S.I.R. is clearly a work of devotion on the part of its creator and a book like that deserves the chance to be someone’s favorite thing in the universe. Me, I’m just a jaded critic, far outside her target audience. I like the book as a promising debut from a strong rookie in a novel genre, and I’m putting my chit down on the felt to say that she may well be capable of great things. She needs to buckle down and do the work first. Fill some sketchbooks just looking at life, you know how it is. But Fell Hound already knows how to pull you right along, and how to give you someone to root for. That’s the hard part. Grab your audience right and everything else is gravy.

The post S.I.R. #1-5 appeared first on The Comics Journal.