Sunday Revue April 8: Valley Of The Silk Sky

There Is A Valley Beyond Your Imaginings...

Enter  this valley, and you step into a new world. Do not apply your own rules or expectations here: they have no place. You are in a new place that plays by its own rules. Learn fast, or things might get a bit...

Dangerous...

The creator, Dylan Edwards, describes the story like so: 

Valley of the Silk Sky is a queer YA sci-fi webcomic for ages 13 and up. Follow the adventures of a crew of queer and trans scientists as they attempt to discover new medicinals, find lost artifacts, and generally try to avoid being eaten by the more dangerous denizens of the Valley.

Valley of The Silk Sky can be read here . Even better, it can be bought on Amazon, Gumroad, or read in many forms available at the artist's main site. 

The Rating

A glorious gem of a story, it only needs a touch of polishing.

The Raves

There is so much to love about the Valley. Especially if you have a scientific bent. Especially if you enjoy good worldbuilding. Especially if you're into adventures that don't ask you to leave your brain at the gate. Especially if you're part of the QUILTBAG  cohort. Especially if you like coming of age stories that don't beat you over the head with the message. Especially if...aw heck, you see where this is going.  

This is the perfect story for an adult and the tweens and teens in their lives to share. It's got enough action to hold an 11 year old's attention, enough nuance to interest an adult, and a really lovely sense of interpersonal humor. The creator has taken the leap that so few world builders dare to do, truly creating a world that is its own entity rather than an analog of our own. Many of the issues we expect to see reflected simply don't apply. That doesn't mean there aren't issues. Oh gods are there issues. But they are not the tired horses of bigotry that we have collectively beaten to death. Now, don't get me wrong, those issues should and do need to be addressed regularly, so that we can understand them. But it's so refreshing to see a story that lets us look at the world as it could be on the other side of the fights we're in today: a world where race and gender are such non-issues that they don't need addressing. The diverse groups of characters, human and otherwise, binary and otherwise, are shown as people. Simple as that. 

The characters in these stories have other things to worry about.

Things like bandits, invasive plant life and deadly predators. Oh, and misfiled paperwork. Lots of it. 

One of the things to love in this work is the relatability in the interpersonal relations and the situations. Strange as it is, we share the characters' frustrations with bureaucracy:

We laugh with them as they experience the wonders and the exasperations of cultural exchanges. And we give a sappy sigh at the power of friendship. Come now, you know you like to give a sappy sigh once in a while.

Another selling point: this story is clever. One of the plot points revolves around invasive plant species. Does the plant eat people? No, but it wipes out economically valuable native species and impoverishes communities by wiping out their livelihood.
*Leans forward over podium* Gentle readers, do you know how rare it is to find a story with a real-world issue that is not overtly violent being used as a main plot point? Especially one that involves the economic value of plant life?
Let me tell you. Vanishingly rare. Hen's Teeth rare. The bookish squeal of delight I let out when I read that scared my cat.

The clever use of science, ethnobotany, biology and architecture makes the world creation a character in its own right. Without beating you over the head at any point, the story subtly weaves its readers into a new biosphere with its own traits. I especially appreciated the nicely understated way in which the creator shows the view of the world through human and non-human eyes to make it clear that the world does, indeed, look different to us all. Especially if 'all' includes beings who see in heat signatures.

The story also makes us question our own assumptions in the best possible way. What at first glance to Western human eyes looks like an alien cheesecake art piece turns out to be a bathing ritual. Yep, Harakos clean themselves and each other the way cats do, with their spiny tongues. No sex involved. Get your mind out of the gutter, you!

I also devoured the chapter addendums, each of which is a witty and well-thought-out world building dissertation. No, this is not boring, dear readers. This is fascinating, and the perfect thing to read with your youngsters in order to get them interested in the underlying structures of their own world to boot. Of course you can always read it yourself, for the sheer joy of exploring new ideas. I know I did. 

The Razzes

The only thing that knocked this story down a peg was the art. Lovely and fascinating as it is, it's also got a bit of work still to do on creating anatomically natural moving characters. Too often, the characters are stiff, especially at a distance. They often seem to be missing joints as well, creating wooden arms and/or legs and a hard-to-pin-down sense of something 'off'.

I'd also like to see a smoothing out of the color washes. The general stylistic effect is nice, but in some areas the effect gets a bit too scribbly and could do with some cleaning up. 

The coloring issues can be aided by running a *slightly* dampened sponge over the color laid down by the marker, as long as the creator is using a water-fast marker for the linework. The body dynamics are best worked on by doing a little more with wire-frame sketches before setting down those final lines. And by that, I don't mean draw more wire-frames. Many, many great artists have used wire frame and still ended up with stiff characters.  Instead, focus on lines of action. 

Art By Patchy9

The line of action technique starts a character not as a series of blocks attached by lines, but as a single flowing lines with other lines radiating from it. The body shapes are then drawn in over these lines, and a character emerges.

Art By Matt Smith

If the creator would like to improve on their fluidity, I'd recommend working on line of action warm up drawings once a week for a while, and maybe working it into their art style.

The Revue

This is a great story. Hand it to your kiddos. Hand it to your nerdy buddies so you can geek out together. Hand it to your favorite biology-field folk. Hand it to some teachers, this would be great in a classroom. It has a lot to teach folks.
What you learn from it may surprise you.