Sin Titulo by Cameron Stewart review

By Dan Horn
July 30, 2014 - 12:31

Nearing the end of auteur David Lynch's quizzical opus Mulholland Drive the viewer is hit with a "twist" that supplants everything that came before it. In any other filmmaker's hands this might have left the viewer feeling gypped or duped, but with Lynch at the helm it doesn't seem like a ruse at all. By the time the rug gets pulled out from under our feet, Lynch has already helped us realize something so profound about Los Angeles, about show business, and about the way we perceive both at various distances that we come away from the experience feeling enlightened rather than cheated. It's not an easy trick to land. God knows many have tried, and yet Lynch is the only film director to come to mind who has succeeded in performing this notoriously dicey maneuver.

Cameron Stewart, perhaps every bit a director in his own rite, though in a different kind of visual medium, succeeds as well with his haunting and hypnogogic graphic novel Sin Titulo. Sin Titulo is a dizzying thriller about a man, Alex, who attempts to visit his somewhat estranged grandfather at a nursing home only to discover that his grandfather has been dead for a month. Amongst his grandfather's personal effects, Alex finds a photo of a mysterious young woman who had ostensibly been paying his grandfather visits. Trying to track this woman down, Alex becomes embroiled in a surreal conspiracy in which dreams are inexplicably shared and a horrifying past comes rushing back from the dark recesses of his memory.

Stewart originally published Sin Titulo online as a free webcomic, but Dark Horse Comics has recently collected the story in a beautiful "widescreen" hardcover. Each page of Sin Titulo has a simple layout of eight thumbnail panels. This is an effective, uncomplicated structure that manages to never become tiresome, because Stewart is always finding new ways of presenting imagery and visual progressions even within these confining strictures. Unlike the artwork he's probably most noted for in his comics career, the dynamic superhero illustrations that have made him one of DC Comics' most instantly recognizable talents, for Sin Titulo Stewart employs a light, minimalistic touch, almost a process of cartoon story-boarding. His palette is also minimal, using only an earthen monochrome to accentuate his otherwise black-and-white images. The combination of all of this makes for a fast-paced, moody, and dreamlike tale that facilitates getting lost in the book's simple beauty and, conversely, its horror.

And Sin Titulo really is frightening, like Mulholland Drive is frightening. Like Lynch, Stewart has a knack for unearthing primal fears that cut straight to the reader's marrow, whether those scares simply come from the numinous unknown or instead from the monster that exists on the fringes of observation. Sin Titulo is a wonderfully dread-inducing experience.

Cameron Stewart's Sin Titulo is David Lynch distilled in two dimensions, even moreso than Lynch's own The Angriest Dog in the World, which coincidentally was also once published by Dark Horse through its Cheval Noir anthology. Much like Lynch's Mulholland Drive, by the time the rug-pulling occurs in Sin Titulo's case (to be clear, Sin Titulo's rug-pull isn't so much a "twist" as it is a "reveal and reset," but it still manages to feel true to the Lynchian trope), Stewart has told us something profound about all the flawed definitions of "man" that were applied to our fathers, about how our fathers in turn put their sons on the same paths to flawed manhood, and about the ways in which art can absolve us of these flaws. More than that, he has challenged us, through such spare and alarming imagery and such evocative text, and perhaps that alone is worth the price of admission.

Rating: 9.5 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12

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