Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders’ graphic novel ‘Five Fists of Science’ is an enjoyable mash-up of history and pulp fiction in which Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla team up to try and bring peace to the world with science. Meanwhile, a cabal including the banker JP Morgan, along with scientists Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi, intend to create a far less benevolent future.
If this combination of history and SF co-starring Edison sounds a bit familiar for an Image original graphic novel, then you’d be remembering right – the concept isn’t a million miles away from 2004’s ‘Tales from the Bully Pulpit’, in which Teddy Roosevelt and the ghost of Thomas Edison travelled in time and wound up fighting Nazis on Mars. While sharing a passion for transplanting historical figures into pulp scenarios, the two books are quite different in tone. ‘Five Fists’ is less lurid than ‘Bully Pulpit’, which is not to say that it’s unimaginative; more that it’s not outright deranged. Instead, this is a charming adventure story that is as much history fan-fiction as anything else, catapulting real people from the late 19th century into the fantasy stories of the early 20th – crime fighters, giant robots, skyscrapers and monsters.
In juggling all these story elements, writer Matt Fraction risks overloading his story, and indeed while the plot hangs together well the odd scene feels a little too busy, the transitions slightly jarring as we skip from one setting to another. Writing dialogue for famous, real people is always dangerous, but when one of those was a famous wit the risk of showing up your own faults as a scriptwriter are even greater. Fraction pulls it off, giving Twain a nice line in laconic asides and blustering showmanship, and capturing in Tesla an authentic feeling of off-kilter genius. The characterisation is broad – and in the case of Marconi, Morgan and others on the enemy side, wildly and deliberately inaccurate – but retains a distinct flavour of believability, rarely descending into caricature.
Steven Sanders’ art is also worthy of praise. A story that throws together past reality with outright fantasy needs grounded art to give it credibility, and Sanders’ nuanced linework provides that kind of credibility. As is often the case with this kind of art, the storytelling is stronger on design and character than movement, and a couple of the action moments are a little too hard to follow and require a quick re-read to get what is going on. In a couple of places there’s also the feeling that little space has been left for the words, with speech bubbles taking convoluted routes around the detail of the art. These are very, very minor gripes, however, and the book is lovely to look at, both in terms of the main narrative and also the supporting material that tops and tails the story.
What makes an original graphic novel worth the cash, and sets it apart from just being a special length comic is that the story feels novelistic, is that it provides something aside from the usual 22 pages of fistfights. ‘Five Fists of Science’ fulfils those criteria, being an inventive, self-contained story that demonstrates a density of ideas and attention to quality that lifts it above the pack. Not quite a knockout, but certainly a worthy contender.
