In an age of dying print media—when many newspapers are going under and books that were once in the hands of many have been replaced with video games, the Internet and television—graphic novels are doing remarkably well. Not quite comics but not quite novels, they combine wonderful artistry and inspired writing in a way nothing else seems to.
Daniel Duford’s The Naked Boy Part I is no exception. As he takes on the tale of the Bear Mother, Duford’s black-and-white drawings alone are enough to captivate the reader.
For those not familiar, the Bear Mother myth tells the story of a young woman whom a bear seduces. She gives birth to twins that are half-human and half-bear and they become the middlemen between the human and spirit worlds. The bear passes on his knowledge to his sons before the woman’s brothers kill him in the spring.
Duford adds his own personal flair to the North American legend and ties in other elements by beginning the story with the Naked Boy’s perspective, who, as it turns out, is the brother of the young woman in the myth. After being spit out by a large sperm whale, the Naked Boy is found by crows. The crows bestow wings upon the boy and raise him as one of their own, fully aware of the prophecy that he is to fulfill.
Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Pawhansett, something terrible is afoot. Numerous townspeople have been murdered. Many believe that the killers are Lyle Walters and his wife, who are said to be a werewolf and witch, respectively. As the Naked Boy moves towards his destiny of killing the bear, a massive witch-hunt breaks out in the town.
Clearly, Duford has gone above and beyond the original idea of the Bear Mother. By combining the Naked Boy’s journey with that of the town, the reader gets much more than the rehashing of an old legend. Duford includes details from his own life (the Naked Boy battles a snapper turtle named Pirate, that bears a striking resemblance to the turtle that supposedly lived in a pond near Duford’s neighborhood when he was a kid), turning it into something else entirely. As Duford writes in the introduction, The Naked Boy Part I is “a simple heroic adventure story, a collective American dream, a political meditation, an epic poem and [his] intellectual autobiography.”
While The Naked Boy Part I made its print debut in late 2009, Duford has been growing the idea since the early nineties, when all he had was a title. He started writing a poem about the Naked Boy, but it wasn’t until later that Duford realized the direction he wanted to go with it. After moving to Portland in 1996 and discovering the independent comic world, he decided that he wanted to create something similar. So he returned to the Naked Boy in 2003 and started adapting it to the form of a graphic novel.
Like the title suggests, though, The Naked Boy Part I is only the first part of the Naked Boy’s story. The series will be a trilogy, and if after reading this first piece you find yourself dying to know what happens next, do not despair: Duford releases a page of the saga each week on his blog (danielduford.blogspot.com), and is now well into the second part.
The print version of The Naked Boy Part II can be purchased online via www.lulu.com for $15. Duford will be signing copies at Bridge City Comics on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.