Writer: Evan Kuhlman
Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books
Loss. It comes to everyone in different forms, at different times, to different degrees, and in literature it typically offsets a gain, one that usually has to be achieved through the course of the story. But loss itself is hardly ever truly explored, instead treated as a mere obstacle. Kuhlman writes a story that simply needed to be told, centering around the Harrelson family’s loss of Francis, their first and admittedly most treasured child.
Stephen is the middle child, thirteen years old and younger brother of Francis, and though the death is explored by all members of the family, Stephen’s perspective is both the most constructive and the most endearing. His innocence lost and faith destroyed, Stephen chooses neither to lash out at the world nor to seek the embrace of his parents but instead decides to begin a comic book series. With the help of his best friend/girlfriend Nicole on art duties, Stephen produces the Adventures of Wolf Boy, an outlet for his imagination as well as his feelings of loss and rage.
There are actual pages of Stephen’s comic printed between the prose pages, illustrated by Brendon and Brian Fraim, which wonderfully capture a youthful design and layout while infused with personal overtones. While the stories are as typically cliché as one would expect from the mind of a young kid, the iconic characters and clever wit demonstrate Kuhlman’s grasp of the energy and thought-process of a young boy’s mind.
Speaking of which, the author’s understanding of youthful exuberance is what helped sell me on Stephen’s character. At first I was a little thrown by his age, as he embraces many interests and hobbies of younger kids but maintains a relationship with Nicole and has a pretty solid understanding of mature situations like death and funerals. While I felt he kept waffling between teen and preteen, it eventually became clear that Stephen’s character exists to offer hope in the face of despair, creation in place of destruction, acceptance rather than denial.
What carries Wolf Boy along more than anything is the beautifully quaint description. It’s the details that make the characters real, even the departed Francis, and add to the weight of the situation, such as when Stephen walks through the woods and finds a species of mushroom, one which Francis had once written an essay about its ability to regenerate, and resolves to continue Francis’ research. On the whole, Wolf Boy can be seen as a long sequence of these details, since it aspires to cover the full extent of the death and all the resultant feelings and situations.
Can the death of a family member fill up 300 pages? At times I wished the characters would indeed move on and get past the death, but that isn’t what this book is about. Wolf Boy explores death and loss in all is facets, from receiving death certificates to fissuring a marriage to mild hallucinations of the dearly departed. Despite the heavy focus on the morbid, it’s a story that needed to be told. It also speaks of the power of comics as a means of escapist fantasy, an aspect too often taken for granted in the medium itself. Although comics are only one theme in the story, Kuhlman reveals their curative nature through Stephen’s efforts and shows that they can be purifying not only for kids, but for whoever needs them.
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