Cover of Unsounded Volume One, by Ashley Cope
Unsounded Volume 1: The Corpse With No Eyes
Author · Artist – Ashley Cope
Managing Editor – Kel McDonald
Book Designer · Prepress Techician – Hye Mardikian
Publisher – C. Spike Trotman
Published by Iron Circus Comics
Some dead men tell tales. Some little girls have tails.
Daughter of the Lord of Thieves, Sette Frummagem is on a mission, and she’ll lie, cheat, and steal to make sure it’s a success (she’ll lie, cheat, and steal anyway). Condemned to aid her in her rotten endeavor is a rotten corpse who seems oddly talented with the supernatural, and oddly not lying motionless in the dirt.
But the road is long, fraught with murderous villains, unimaginable beasts, and the indefatigable reaches of the law. On this quest, no one is what they seem; never trust a thief, and never trust anyone who won’t let you look into his eyes.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: there’s these two people, and they’re different. Like, really different. Seriously temperamentally mismatched. They don’t like each other, can barely get along, but—get this!—they have a goal that they need to accomplish together. So, haltingly, fractiously, with a lot of sniping and snark and frustration, they set out on a journey that will…
Hmm. Bring them together in common cause? Turn them into fire-forged friends? Teach them to respect one another’s unique strengths and recognize how they fill in one another’s gaps?
That’s the classic Buddy Cop dynamic, and more broadly any Buddy Road Trip. It’s such a ubiquitous set of tropes that I don’t even really need to give examples, right? You’ve already thought of at least half a dozen. It’s so universally understood, in fact, that it’s really easy to see the shape of those tropes, and anticipate the way they’ll pay off… when they’re not even really there.
Unsounded Volume 1: The Corpse With No Eyes has some of the elements of a Buddy narrative; it’s got a protagonist duo who are being forced to cooperate and really resent having to do so. But by the end of this first volume collecting Ashley Cope’s popular dark fantasy webcomic, there is very little uniting in common cause. Amoral child and thief Sette Frummagem and undead spell-weaver Duane Adelier are decidedly not fire-forged friends. And respect one another’s unique strengths and learning from them? Absolutely not.
And Ashley Cope does something really interesting here that set some of my tropier expectations that adhere to the Buddy Narrative on their ears; neither of these protagonists is likeable.
I know, this looks like friendly banter. This is as nice as it gets. This is them getting along.
“Likeability” is complicated of course. There are probably readers who find Sette or Duane likeable. Certainly they both have admirable qualities. But they’re also both genuinely awful in other ways. Sette is bold and confident but so cocky and impulsive that she barely has a sense of self-preservation; she’s cheerfully, smugly amoral and her invective towards Duane is downright vicious. Duane is responsible, sometimes kind, and has a code of honour; he’s also aloof, superior, deeply bigoted towards residents of one of this secondary world’s nations, and weirdly patriotic towards his own eugenics-loving country which apparently betrayed him horribly (he is, and I need to emphasize this, undead).
So yes, my expectations were thrown by the book seeming to be a Buddy Comedy; I thought I was meant to like Sette and find her funny, and I got so angry at some of her genuinely cruel insults towards Duane that I nearly stopped reading. It took me time to realize that Cope was aiming for something else. Something more like if Leiber wrote the Gray Mouser as a vicious little girl and Fafhrd as an uptight and possibly racist wizard, and they really, really didn’t like each other.
Sette really has no sense of self-preservation at all.
I’m talking a lot about the dynamic between Sette and Duane, partly because I think framing the story appropriately is important for potential readers—so that for instance you don’t get thrown out of it, like I very nearly did, by Sette’s insults, some of which I found genuinely hateful—but also because that tension between the two leads, and the absence of an easy resolution for it, is one of several fascinating things that Ashley Cope is doing here, and probably the boldest creative choice.
The book’s other strengths require a bit less unpacking. Although the way that Sette talks to people (not just Duane) can sometimes be vicariously ear-scorching, the dialogue is well-crafted, and reveals character and world-building without being too on-the-nose about it. Well, Duane and the other magically gifted characters have a propensity for info-dumping but that’s clearly framed as an occupational hazard and personal flaw.
And the world-building overall is really well done. This is a setting with some interesting elements, including its peoples, gods and the way magic works; all of that emerges very naturally over time. It took a couple of lengthy chapters for me to realize that Sette having a tail is really, really weird in this world, and that Duane being both undead and capable of independent thought and volition is unprecedented in the experience of most of the people they encounter.
Cope has made some logical extrapolations from the existence of magic to its implications for the rest of the world, including politics and the economy. For instance, in some of this world’s nations, slavery is legal. In others it emphatically isn’t, but zombie labour is—that’s regular mindless shambling zombies, not Duane. People on both sides of that divide consider the other choice to be horrifying, and all of this becomes plot-relevant in short order.
The setting also employs idiosyncratic fantasy terminology (“wrights” for spellcasters, “plods” for zombie workers) smoothly and naturally, so that a reader picks up on it without even noticing.
The plot is admittedly a bit more Standard Fantasy, which isn’t the same as saying it’s simple or uncomplicated. Sette and Duane start out thinking they’re on a straightforward mission to shake down a wayward member of her crime family for the piece of the action he owes her father. They predictably stumble into attempting to foil an evil scheme (over Sette’s objections) with continent-shaking implications, and then keep running into it through the magic of plot-driven coincidence. That’s not really a criticism. Almost any plot requires a certain degree of narrative contrivance. It’s fine, the story keeps running and the characters are kept at entertaining levels of acrimony. (By the end, there are at least five separate groups of protagonists, antagonists, and miscellaneous -agonists at points in between. None of them like each other, including the ones who are working together.)
Yes, she’s like this with everyone.
This is probably a good place to note that the publisher’s synopsis of Unsounded Volume One, which I quoted above, and the promotional material I received alongside it, kind of undersells how dark this story goes. It’s not just how nasty a mouth Sette has. Particularly in its inclusion of slavery and quite overtly depicted violence, including towards children, this can fairly be described as a work of dark fantasy, and some of those elements probably merit a content warning for readers who might find them upsetting. All in all, it represented quite a tonal shift from the lighthearted fantasy-buddy-comedy I was expecting (though some of that is definitely down to me and my own trope-driven expectations).
Moving on from the writing, the art is also very strong. Cope draws breathtaking vistas and action scenes alike with flair. The characters are all distinct, dynamic and expressive, even Duane who’s literally hiding his undead face throughout using magic—he’s the titular corpse with no eyes. Cope also steps away from her story’s primary style at key moments to use other techniques to illustrate heightened emotions—for dreams, flashbacks, visions and myths—to great effect.
This first volume of the collected Unsounded hooked me early, nearly lost me for probably idiosyncratic reasons, then got me right back on that hook. (There’s a threshold of meanness I can’t pass without disliking a fictional character; as long as I’m not meant to like them, I can manage.) This is a strong work of fantasy, albeit a sometimes dark one, and tells its story through the medium of comics really, really well. I’m glad I stuck with it, and I recommend it. I look forward to the next volumes in the series!
Disclaimer: I have no personal or professional connection with the creator or publisher. A publicist provided a complimentary electronic copy of the graphic novel for review.
