Writer / Penciller / Colour Artist: Owen D. Pomery / Avery Hill Publishing
10th September 2020
The Pitch: On a summer's day, Ellen returns to the coastal town she grew up in, the picturesque, yet architecturally strange, Victory Point. Revisiting old haunts and people from her past, she feels increasingly disconnected from her previous life, and exhausted by the constant struggle of trying to forge the path ahead.
There's a strange feeling of calm that washes over you as you read Victory Point. Despite the inner-turbulence and borderline irritation with everyone she meets, the lead character Ellen's journey through the town to her home perfectly recreates the feeling of a summer's day, the giddy excitement and trepidation of reconnecting (willingly or otherwise) with old friends. Within its pages, it manages to encapsulate the creeping, middle-class youthful ennui of Londoners, legacy, age, history and even a touch of what I can only describe as the mundanely supernatural. I don't think I've read anything quite this good outside of mainstream comics in a while.
Ellen has allowed the cynicism of city life to grow in her veins.
Victory Point is an unfinished town. Unfinished like most great dreams and all small lives. Despite seemingly being considered a failed relic of the past (like the way we often look at our parents), the town and the concept behind it, thrive with ideals that are actually fashionable now - hope, inclusion, progression. Sadly, like the hopes and ideals of today, the actuality does meet the dream. This serves as a wonderful metaphor for Ellen herself, lost and trying to find her way back. Despite being young, Ellen has allowed the cynicism of city life to grow in her veins and she brings it back with her to Victory Point. She internally mocks the choices and pursuits of her peers and the younger people visiting her hometown for the first time forgetting that in some ways she's become a stranger here herself. Being from a place is not the same as living in it.
Victory Point has a living legacy. Sons have taken over their father's businesses. It's a legacy that Ellen sets herself apart from, despite her journey home becoming a trip down memory lane, even to the point where she may have met a lingering ghost of her mother and self, at least in a metaphorical sense, in a beautiful scene that only hints at what it's true nature might have been after the fact. The books' narration creates clipped chapter points for Ellen's journey and slowly turns from a wider societal view to a personal one. Eventually becoming an oral history of the town, a point reinforced when Ellen finally sees her Dad again. Oral history has a fine tradition in the meta world of comics – don't we as readers often engage in it as we excitedly tell friends about a great comic we've read?
Pomery’s colours are perfect, creating the illusion of sunlight and the sound of the ocean.
Pomery's art is spare in its shapes and rich in its details, even when it comes to people's faces. Their eyes tell the truth of their emotions. I hope he doesn't take offence to this, but I was reminded of Playmobil figures with their rounded, friendly shapes. Fitting I suppose, because Victory Point might seem like something of a toy town to critics and naysayers. People who forget how important it is to let the imagination play. His colours and lighting are perfectly judged, creating the illusion of sunlight and shade, the sound of the ocean, the cool breeze coming off it. Victory Point is a technically and emotionally immersive work that speaks to how you not only can go home again but can also carry home with you, all your days. I'll want to read this again sometime, maybe when I'm feeling lost.
Victory Point is available now from comic stores, or from the Avery Hill Shop.
