Beanworld: A Gift Comes!

"Larry Marder is such an intriguing and extraordinary figure. He started off self-publishing this, and then at some point – I think in the late 1980s – he sold it to an independent publisher called Eclipse Comics, and Eclipse put out 21 issues. And that’s all there ever were. I think he later did some short stories, but the original run of the comic was just 21 issues. As with Bone , the Beanworld books have a very engaging and simple art style. The core story is about a tiny world. Most issues start with a little map of the world, and it’s just an island, with this strange abstract ocean around it: that is the entirety of the Beanworld. On one side there’s the Legendary Edge, and on the other side is the Proverbial Sandy Beach. And it’s inhabited by little beans with arms and legs. They eat something called chow, and in order to obtain it they have to dive off the Legendary Edge into the Four Realities. They go down to a place where there are huge creatures called the Hoi-Polloi, who hold chow, so the beans have to fight the Hoi-Polloi, grab the chow and bring it back. They don’t eat it, they just immerse their bodies in it, and they absorb all they need to live. And then the other side of that transaction is that there’s a tree at the centre of the island, and every so often, the fruit of the tree falls down – that’s called a sprout-butt – and they take that down and give it to the Hoi-Polloi. The Hoi-Polloi make chow out of the sprout-butt. The sprout-butt itself is sentient, and consents to being turned into chow. It’s very odd! But from this really simple schema with very few elements, Larry Marder creates a little tiny epic, which is just wonderful to read. The beans have a hero called Mr. Spook, who has a weapon – it’s a trident, but they call it Mr Spook’s fork. The main character is called Beanish, and he becomes a kind of shaman to the beans. He discovers that every day he can ascend into another reality where he meets this lady named Dreamish, who is like the goddess of the sun. Or she’s just a sun with a face… she refuses to explain what she is. And he starts to learn that he can control time to spend more time with her, he can extend the moment of noon as long as he wants to. In Volume Two, A Gift Comes, a couple of really game-changing things happen. The first thing is that Mr Spook loses his fork: it gets stolen from him by these strange little creatures called the Goofy Service Jerks. And the other thing is that a gift come. A messenger comes and tells the beans that there will be a gift, and they don’t know what the gift is; and most of the book is them preparing for it. And then the revelation of the gift… Fairy tale or folkloric. One of the inspirations for the Beanworld was Native American mythology. Marder originally had an entire myth cycle in mind. He was doing this from the mid-1980s to 1993. In 1993, he was given a job as executive director at Image Comics, and he just stopped writing and drawing. He worked for Image for six or seven years, increasingly involved not even with their comics but with their toy division; and then he got a job working for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, he was in charge of that for several years. And his creative output just stopped, which was anguish and agony for me and many of his readers. And he seemed to be very fulfilled by those administrative jobs! He never talked about them as any kind of sacrifice. He does now talk about coming back to the Beanworld, but he’s quite cautious about it. He’s making no promises. As I said, he had an entire myth cycle in mind; he said this is spring, and he was going to do all four seasons. But one of the inspirations for the stories was his relationship with his wife, and she’s dead now. The character of Dreamish, the sun with the face, was very much based on his wife. And in his mind when she spoke, she spoke with his wife’s voice. He’s not sure that he can recreate her now. Yes, absolutely! Marder is doing something that’s unique to comics, I think. It’s like how Snoopy’s doghouse doesn’t work in three dimensions, in the Peanuts cartoon – he lies on the roof, and it’s a pitched roof, so he’s lying on a point, right? You only ever see it from the side. Schulz said himself that if people try to visualise it in three dimensions, it falls apart instantly. The Beanworld is the same: it’s a two-dimensional projection. It’s a plane. It’s a world that has no depth, it’s like an ant farm. You only ever see it sideways on."