The medium of comic books has always had an interest in highlighting fundamentally human relationships against a remarkable backdrop of spandex, super strength, and sinister villains. And over time, characters like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, and the very mortal cast of ‘The Walking Dead’ have served as the comic book conduits to define, explore, and challenge readers’ understanding of people and their relationships.
But some creators are uprooting the subject so completely by planting within their narratives stylistic and genre-defying tropes of horror, and the results can be astoundingly brutal to the senses. One of Image Comics’ latest ongoing series ‘Family Tree’ — collected in a volume of the first four issues, entitled, “Sapling,” perfectly weds elements of body and ecological horror to explore the terror faced by a family challenged by an unexplainable apocalyptic scenario of life and death.
In ‘Family Tree,’ a fractured family with its own everyday foibles must contend with a strange illness that threatens to transform one of the children into a tree.
Written by Jeff Lemire and illustrated by Phil Hester, Ryan Cody and Eric Gapstur, the series teleports readers into familiar, semi-post-apocalyptic territory when single mother Loretta — disenfranchised as a grocery store clerk and discouraged with the difficulty she faces raising two kids alone — discovers that her young daughter has developed a rash that appears to be turning her arm into a tree branch. The malady spreads quickly, and if they don’t respond with alacrity Meg appears doomed to become a literal family tree — although not before Loretta and her family also find themselves pursued by dogmatic ecoterrorists and haphazardly protected by her late husband’s eccentric father. In search of an antidote that will stop young Meg’s transformation, the crew must confront the gnarled and decayed roots of their own relationships.
Lemire is perfectly at home in this surreal magical landscape that provides few answers for now and little more need for them. Like the inexplicable pandemic that swept across the world, the series’ conflict does not ask for explanation or understanding — it merely demands a visceral, authentic response. And narrated entirely in the future of the series’ events, the first installment of the series suggests that Lemire has long-term plans for his cast. The end of the world implications feel in fact a little too familiar for readers too close to the events of a global pandemic. The ostracized isolation of our heroes is unsettlingly reminiscent of quarantine, and readers can be heartened that there appears to be light at the end of this very dangerous, very diabolical tunnel — even if there is little certainty that each hero will arrive at that destination.
Aided by an ensemble of diverse characters, Lemire manages to examine the central conflict of this already dysfunctional, now disintegrating family through the eco horror that threatens to consume them. Grandfather Judd warns that Meg’s mysterious fate perfectly mirrors that of her late father. This is no strange twist of fate; rather, it’s happening again as it’s happened before, suggesting a cyclical explanation to this inexplicable phenomenon, a generational germ of destruction that deconstructed this family before just as it promises to do again if the family does not somehow work together. Loretta once believed her husband Darcy had abandoned the family — now she too must contend with this horror while she is suddenly allowed some painful closure to her dissolved marriage. The reality that what is happening to Meg here has happened before brings an additional ecological endgame to Lemire’s adventure. For their own part, the Arborists — in close pursuit and confident that Meg’s transformation will usher in the end of the world — implicitly promise that there is more to this story than readers could possibly imagine in the series’ first four chapters. There are potentially lasting consequences for this epidemic and the series, and readers can only imagine that Lemire will implant more and more lush, vibrant characters and conflicts into the narrative along the way.
Meanwhile, the art team of Hester, Cody, and Gapstur have tapped into a style perfectly suited for the Cronenberg-like body horror of the series so far. Their rustic, angular approach captures the living, organic, and ultimately unpredictable nature of the story itself, providing sometimes momentary, other times intimate looks at the mutation that promises to turn living creatures into human-sized saplings. And the same Earthbound infection or Heavenly ailment itself complements in its twisted, deep-rooted way the same wounds that have scarred this family. Loretta is now faced with the realization that her husband is not in fact a deserter but a devoted family man who hoped to spare his loved ones the sight that they now see taking shape in young Meg. At the end of his life and desperately trying to be the father figure that he never was for Darcy, Judd could now bequeath unto Josh some necessary qualities that will allow him to become the new if younger protector of the family. The very mysterious epidemic that quickly threatens to transform Meg into a full-fledged tree also irrevocably transforms each family member’s role within the unit, the creators’ comment on the transformative nature of adversity on even the strongest family.
And yet Lemire and his graphic gardeners do not appear concerned with telling the story of a once great family seemingly destroyed by hardship. On the contrary, the series appears much more fascinated — as readers will be — with the story of an already troubled family’s growth stifled further under a greater collapse of harrowing rubble …
… And the potential that that overwhelmed family can miraculously creep through the cracks, back into the light.
These are the seeds planted by Lemire and the series’ creators, and the growth that readers can expect from this series only requires the nurturing nature of more time.
And a horrifying time with a terrified family is precisely what Lemire & Company have promised.
You can find Family Tree on Amazon (ad):
