Jon Lewis's SHELLMEN

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Shellmen

Jon Lewis's ambitious, enchanting new Alternative Comics series, Shellmen, takes place in a decaying city populated by intelligent talking animals and inarticulate, apelike humans. The animals have no idea who could have built the bizarre structures amongst and inside of which they live — but whoever it was, they are surely gone from the world now! The premiere issue of Shellmen will be released in the fall of 2000.

The crisscrossing storylines of Shellmen tell the tales of a wide cast of characters, including a retiring but curious-minded toad; three low-ranking members of a great and warlike ratclan; a nesting pair of robins; a one-eyed mouse and his best friend, a neurotic, street-preaching crow; a squirrel with a genius for music; and a much-feared bluejay whose vocabulary encompasses the supernatural.

Each issue of Shellmen follows the point of view of a given character: in Issue One, Arkel the Toad's contemplative life is disturbed by the unwanted attentions of a powerful ratclan; in Issue Two, the robins Dein and Nance discover a strange and fateful egg in their nest; in Issue Three Perquart, Fokie and Duggler, a forage gang of rats, face the unearthly wrath of a thunder-spirit and the earthly wrath of an enemy clan; in Issue Four Killiter the Squirrel is forced from home when the traditions of her people threaten to get her killed; and so on, with these characters being rejoined again in later issues for a second story, in addition to making appearances in one another's stories.

Jon Lewis is probably best known for his innovative animal tale True Swamp of 1994-95, a title which garnered a loyal cult following and is still talked about today. Shellmen marks Lewis' exciting return to a "nature subject," and it's drawing from him some of the most striking art he has yet produced.

Like in True Swamp, the animal cast of Shellmen look like animals, and have to do without opposable thumbs, tiny cottages, and clothing. But also like in True Swamp, their concerns remain touchingly human. "Any creature blessed and/or cursed with the powers of thought and memory is going to pretty much face the same set of dilemmas," says Lewis. Asked about the differences between True Swamp and Shellmen, Lewis observes that "firstly, the new series has a wide cast of equally focal characters. It isn't centralized around a single character like True Swamp was. Also, and I'm not saying Shellmen is scientifically or biologically accurate, far from it, but I did a lot of research before starting it, much more than I've ever done for a story before, because I wanted to try to figure out from the actual natural traits of the different species what kind of culture and traditions that species would develop if they were intelligent. And conversely, I'm having to imagine what human life would become if we were stripped of our intelligence. But all that is just kind of a springboard from which I get to write a big sprawling fantasy with all kinds of little intrigues and mysteries and introspections and all that good stuff."

Another difference with True Swamp is that Shellmen will not bear the Mature Readers designation — Lewis is keeping the language to a "PG" level, and the action to "nothing you wouldn't see on a PBS nature documentary."

Two installments of Shellmen appeared in Lewis's anthology title Spectacles. "I realized at that point that this was a really important story for me, and that I'd better focus my undivided attention on it. I also realized that the pacing of the story and the art style I'd established for it were all wrong. So everything in the Shellmen series is totally rethought and redrawn. There's nothing reprinted. And a lot of the events and characters have been rethought too, so it's really a new start from a blank slate."

Jon Lewis will be premiering Shellmen #1 at this The Expo: Small Press Expo, September 17-19 in Bethesda, Maryland. Other Alternative Comics creators in attendance will be Sam Henderson (Magic Whistle), James Kochalka (Sunburn), and Jen Sorensen (Slowpoke). The Expo website is: http://www.spxpo.com/.