It's June! And you know what that means! Fellow Minnions, allow me to introduce Phantomarine, by Claire Niebergall.
The Web site is
www.phantomarine.com or you can
go directly to the first page.
Updates have been pretty consistent on Monday and Friday since I've been reading. Not sure how the chapter breaks go since I started reading partway through the current one.
The story opens when princess Phaedra Philemon's vacation is interrupted by mysterious supernatural assassins. As a result, she gets to meet her sworn enemy: Cheth, the god of death, also known as the Red Tide King, or, to the fans, Jeff.
Cheth has no body of his own, due to spoiler reasons, but he has the next best thing: The ghosts of everyone who has ever died, human or animal. Which still aren't bodies, but you know, he makes do. Sort of: Like all ghosts, he's bound to the sea and can't go on land.
You'd think that would be where Phaedra (Phae to her friends) comes in. Problem is, she's a ghost too. Now, she was the first person who successfully challenged Cheth and earned her right to return to life, but let's just say there were some complications. So she's stuck on the water too, along with the friends who died alongside her.
Enter Pavel Morena, an incredibly adorable kid with a nasty case of "seabite" from having his head chomped by a ghost fish. The prognosis is not good for kids (or adults) with that condition, but he's managing with the help of his scientist mom Vanna. Pavel is one of the few people to have any sympathy for the sea ghosts or Cheth himself, which leads to a certain amount of friction when he meets up with Phae. Most importantly, he isn't dead yet, which means he can go on land.
That's important because if Phae and her friends want to return to life, they'll need to go on a fetch quest for Cheth after something that was squirreled away somewhere on land, probably specifically to keep it away from him. There's also a deadline involved: If Phae takes too long, she and her friends will be permanently deaded, each of them just another mindless husk in Cheth's collection, conscious of nothing but ravenous hunger for the souls of the living.
But I haven't mentioned the most important character: Katja, the Spooky Samoyed. (Oh, there's a LOT of alliteration on the cast page.) You know what a cloud looks like? You know the dogs from Undertale? You know what happiness looks like if you compress it into dog form? That's Katja. She's not so much comic relief as cute relief.
I'd say it's appropriate for general audiences, but there are some scary scenes (god of death and all, but he's not even the scariest character), lots of death (Did I mention most of the main characters are ghosts?) and quasi-death/fate-worse-than-death stuff. It's gore-free and minimally bloody, but there are some glimpses of that body Phae's not using anymore, after it was lost at sea for a while. ("I threw up," one character says matter-of-factly.) You might want to read through it yourself before you show it to the young'uns. There's no sex, though one character shows a frankly uncomfortable amount of cleavage (but then everything about her is uncomfortable).
In terms of tone and genre, it's overall pretty light-hearted, never going too long without a laugh. However there are some harrowing action sequences and some piercing tragedy. ("I'm sorry," the author writes repeatedly in the comments for the pages leading up to one particular twist of the knife.) Overall, it's the same kind of action-adventure as SSSS, though secondary-world fantasy rather than post-apocalyptic.
As the author explains it on the
about page:
I aim for the comic to be generally PG-rated – some serious spookiness, but nothing too extreme. You can expect a few scary moments, mild language, dark humor, a touch of body horror, and lots of situations involving… well… death! For a good metric, it doesn’t get much darker than the darkest scenes of Harry Potter.
The artwork is fantastic. It's a cartoonier style than SSSS, which lends itself to some amazing expressions. Case in point:
Okay, maybe that's a bad example since it's pretty chibi-cute. Here's a messy collage of some of my favorite Phaedra faces from the current chapter.
So, is there anything I
don't like? Well, maybe. I mentioned the uncomfortable cleavage. But structurally, I feel like Phae and her friends disappear from the story for too long, so soon after their predicament is set up, while we focus on Pavel for a couple chapters. However, there's a good reason for that, and ultimately it didn't bother me much. The stuff with Pavel and his mom is excellent, and I can't think of a way to cut back to Phae in the middle of it without ruining something. You'll just have to trust me when I say that we will get back to Phae and Cheth and the rest of the ghostly cast. I guess I'm also a little disappointed that the other seabitten kids introduced around the same time as pavel don't seem to show up again after that, but you never know. The author aims for fifteen chapters, and we're currently at chapter five, so there's plenty of time for them to return. These are all mild complaints, anyway.
If I haven't sold you yet, consider: There's also a lively community in the comments under each page, and the author is an active participant! And for you language nerds, Cheth can't speak to anyone who isn't dead and be understood, and the symbols he emits when he tries are a modified substitution cipher that the fans have had fun attempting to crack.
