Near the beginning of Emergence, the second book in Keenan Carola and Jeremy McKinnon’s Fruition of the Damned graphic novel series, our young hero, Leafio, stands before a mountain at the bottom of an ocean. From the peak, Leafio’s two older brothers gaze down on him, leading the reader, as this series so often does, to revel in its unique form as a piece of digital storytelling. In Fruition, mountains are measured in page scrolls instead of feet, underwater bubbles aren’t constrained to a single panel, and the chase of a powder-blue “watercatt” illustrates, in a way no physical comic can, the spatial and emotional depths that the characters are traversing. Like its predecessor, Prelude to Rapture, Emergence balances creative, violent action with reflective psychological moments among its primary characters, the brothers Leafio, Raff, and Kentaro. Detailing the centuries the brothers spent in subaquatic exile, Emergence‘s final panels hint at a confrontation whose breadth and brutality may not, even in terms of page scrolls, be measurable at all.
You can read Fruition of the Damned: Emergence by clicking these words.
baby pictures of famous dictators 