Stand Still, Stay Silent, by Minna Sundberg

[rachelmanija]

A magical plague sweeps the world, turning affected humans and animals into monsters, and only the Nordic nations survive. (At least, as far as they know.) Iceland, which isolated itself, is the most advanced country in the world, Denmark has its human population living entirely on a tiny island, the Finns are considered odd and backward and have their own unique kind of magic, and cats are essential military supplies as they can sense trolls.

Characters are introduced in brisk and witty summations, then developed from there. This makes the large cast a lot easier to track, and gives the whole world a sense that it’s full of real people with quirks and agendas, even if they only appear on a single page. The main cast consists of a handful of expendable weirdos and misfits who have been selected to go on a mission into the Silent Land, where trolls and monsters roam unopposed, to bring back books. Old books are a rarity as trolls can be destroyed by fire, so big chunks of previous human habitation have been burned to the ground.

A stunningly beautiful, inventive, witty, fun, and sometimes spooky full-color webcomic. The cast is extremely likable, the world is wonderful, and the author’s in-universe military recruitment pamphlets (clearly gunning for cannon fodder), explanation of the grades of cats (A, B, and C, according to how much training they have), and so forth are both hilarious and great worldbuilding. I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed this or recommend it too highly.

I have a hard time reading comics online, so I read this in paper form. I’ve only read the first book, so I left off when the expedition has just started out and Lalli is seeing visions of a redheaded girl with a braid and freckles. Please no spoilers past that point.

The full-color art is absolutely gorgeous, as is the design of the paper book. If you can afford it, it’s certainly worth it; if not, you can read the entire saga for free online. Books 1 and 2 can be ordered in hard copy. I believe the story is still ongoing.

Comments

[sheliak]

It's been a while since I caught up with this one--there were some later plot developments that I wasn't entirely onboard with--but I adore the art, to the point where I'm tempted to buy physical copies after reading it online. I also really love how Sundberg indicates that the characters are speaking different languages with little flags in their speech balloons--it's a really clever way of handling that.

(Early on, my main problem was that I missed the prologue characters—I'd been warned ahead of time that they weren't the main cast, but I definitely got invested in them more quickly than the actual main characters, and I was sad not to see more of them.)

[dorotheian]

Yes, similar problems with the prologue! I did get attached to those characters more quickly.

[sheliak]

Yeah, I wanted to know what happened next to Aksel and his grandma! (And I mean, we sort of do find out in a vague way, but I still missed them.)

[rachelmanija]

Me too! I wanted an entire volume following up on the prologue characters. I was weirdly attached to the grumpy employee with a cat in a carrier.

[sholio]

The way the comic handles language is one of my favorite things about it! It's such a clever visual solution to handling a world where the characters are all speaking multiple languages, some of which are mutually intelligible and some aren't, some characters able to understand more than they can speak, and so forth. It's really well done and never (or at least rarely) left me unclear on who could understand whom. I also really liked that the comic didn't get around the language barrier by just having non-bilingual characters become magically fluent, but goes ahead with translation/intelligibility issues being an ongoing concern.

[sheliak]

I've occasionally read books that tried to deal with the same problem by using different punctuation for each language, but this is a much more elegant solution. (And a lot more workable given the number of different languages that the main characters speak.)

And yeah, it's very committed to the language barrier—no one picks up a second language improbably fast, everyone just has to keep dealing with it.