Writer/Artist: Mike Kunkel
Collecting HEROBEAR AND THE KID #1-5
Price: $19.95
Publisher: Astonish Comics
ISBN: 0972125914

There's something about polar bears that is inherently noble and grand, though I'm not quite sure what it is. Maybe it's their size and the feeling that they could beat almost anything short of a rhino into submission and then wrestle a shark for dinner. Philip Pullman knows this; his polar bears wore magic armour and behaved like furry samurais.

Mike Kunkel knows this, too. His titular Herobear is a stuffed animal that turns into a larger than life figure when he gets tapped on his enormous nose, and even though I had seen the image before, there is something spectacular about the character's first appearance. Part of it is a function of Kunkel's busy and detailed pages giving way to Herobear filling up the page, towering over the kid, but part of it is the image itself, which imparts the feelings of fear and danger that such a creature conveys.

The 'kid' of the book is Tyler, who we meet at his grandfather's funeral. His parents and sister Katie have moved into his grandfather's old house, run by the precise butler Henry. Tyler moves into a room in the Library Tower and finds that he has been left two gifts; a stuffed bear and a pocket watch, neither of which he has much interest in.

Tyler feels uncomfortable receiving a gift, because his grandfather has died. He's also generally unhappy about moving to a new town and going to a new school. When he first goes to bed in the new house, he looks lost sleeping in the huge bed that dominates the room. His first day at school is a disaster; he just misses the bus, and has to run after it while kids make bets on whether or not he'll make it.

In short order, Tyler meets Vanessa, only managing to avoid drooling because of a very active and loud imagination, then gets embarrassed by his sister, who brought his bear with her to school, and makes enemies of the Bullio brothers, who leave Tyler sucking wind in the sandbox.

In many respects, the story sounds fairly routine and archetypal, and wouldn't be too out of place in an old Hollywood movie about overcoming obstacles and doing good and all. Kunkel uses this familiarity to his advantage by taking the time and using the space to really develop a way to tell a story that fits it. By holding to these archetypes, he finds a way in to the story and his characters. What's so impressive is just how well developed the characters are. It's those small moments that really matter here, and Kunkel makes breathing life into small characters look easy.

The artwork is stunning, not simply because of what it is, but because of what it isn't. Kunkel, who comes from an animation background, doesn't ink over his pencils and doesn't erase the construction lines, giving the book a different feel to a typical comics page. His expressive faces make it easy to look past the construction lines, but those lines add fluidity and motion to the page.

At first glance, most of his pages seem busy, and they are. Kunkel doesn't waste space, and when he uses a near wordless page of few panels it's a deliberate attempt to slow the pace of the story and create emphasis. A signal to the reader to pause. His pages never feel cluttered, though. They're intense and focused, and Kunkel doesn't show off; he plunges the reader into the story and really use the art to match the manic feel of the scenes.

When Herobear finally flies, with Tyler clutched to his back, I have to admit I gasped. After all the years of cartoons and comics and movies where such actions are common, I gasped, probably much like Tyler did. I could sit here and analyse it deeper, really look at what it is that captured my attention, and how the larger than life aspects slowly crept into the book, but I think it was the sheer joy involved; the joy in the characters, the joy evident in their creator, and the joy in me as a reader, who would have liked nothing more as a kid than a flying bear.

I console myself with the knowledge that Tyler doesn't get to look at the beautiful two-page spread of Herobear criss-crossing the sky, and I do.

What makes this book so good is that Kunkel has tapped into this feeling, this sense of place and time that our childhood becomes for us in later life, but he never lets the story become overly sentimental, and he refuses to soften the harsher aspects of childhood. Feelings of magic and possibility lie at the centre of this book. Not the idea that such possibility lies at the centre of childhood, per se, but that it lies at the centre of life. That it can be.

That's the key to all great coming of age stories. Not just the fantastic ones, but the realistic ones too. It's easy to simply portray the adult world as corrupting the innate innocence of children. A great artist knows that any good coming of age story is about realizing the fantastic and finding a way to incorporate that into one's life. It's about hope and joy and trying to envision the man we want to be, and understanding what that means. Mike Kunkel knows that and he's given this small gift to the rest of us to remind us for a few minutes of what that feels like.

Alex Dueben is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.