Art Is a Revolution in This Look Inside Salamandre

How do you grieve in a land the place artwork is forbidden? That’s the fascinating query on the coronary heart of Tales From the Umbrella Academy author I.N.J. Culbard’s new graphic novel, the most recent launch from Karen Berger’s comics imprint at Dark Horse—and io9 has a luxurious look inside.

Salamandre follows Kasper, its titular hero, a younger artist within the wake of a tragic loss. Choosing to go and reside along with his grandfather, Kasper ventures to the land behind the Iron Veil—a kingdom dominated with an iron fist that outlaws flowers, music, and the act of artwork itself. As Kasper turns his creative skills inwards to course of his loss, he finds himself getting into a world of revolution and spycraft, an underground resistance the place artists combat again in opposition to the Emperor’s sinister secret police to liberate their artistic work.

“This has been a story that I have been wanting to find a way to tap into, but had, for a long time, never really found a way to do that, until now,” Culbard stated in an e mail to io9. “I wanted to take elements of my own childhood and write what I know, but my memories, like a lot of people’s memories, are fragmented and unreliable. Couple that with coming from a family where there were so many secrets, I could only ever be my own unreliable narrator. So I leaned into the way a story changes with each telling, the way we embellish, the way we confabulate because at the heart of all that is a true story. This is a story about a young boy who loses his father and in turn loses himself in his grief and is sent to stay with his grandfather in a country which has lost its freedom of expression to a totalitarian regime. It draws on my experiences growing up on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.”

“I spent all my summers as a child, right up into my late teens, travelling to Poland. Sometimes I’d fly, sometimes I’d travel by coach, and sometimes I’d travel by train. Often I would travel alone,” Culbard continued. “There were times I’d be stood on the platform of a ghost station in Berlin at midnight surrounded by border officials with guns and barking dogs while our couchette was searched before we were allowed back on the train and on our way. And there were times when I would attend Solidarity rallies in Poland with family who were members of that movement.”

“There were a lot of experiences I could draw from but what I didn’t want to do was make it a story specifically about that time and place. Recollection is an act of imagination, whether something we are recounting happened or not. I didn’t really want to talk about how things were in a matter of fact manner because when we create art it’s not how something is, it’s how it feels, just as a memory is not how something was, it’s how something felt.”

Salamandre arrives on bookstore cabinets November 15, after hitting comedian e-book shops earlier this month. Click by way of to see a preview from the early components of the graphic novel—alongside unique commentary on every web page courtesy of I.N.J. Culbard!