Inkblot vol. 1

Once upon a time there was a great family of explorers whose head broke through the walls separating the six major realms of the world and earned his name Xenthos Voidbreaker.  His family then went on to explore these realms for conquest, peace, discovery, and knowledge.  One of them, The Seeker (a.k.a. Bookworm), decided to stay at home and do her exploring via all the books and other knowledge her family brings back to their living castle.  The Seeker spends her days chronicling the history of her family and performing magical experiments for the good of all.  As she’s immersed herself in magic, it should come as no surprise that the most random of acts can have great consequence.  Which is how she conjures a cat that can journey through time and space after knocking over an inkwell while she falls asleep at her desk one day.

“Inkblot” comes to us from co-creators Emma Kubert and Rusty Gladd.  As co-writer/artist and co-writer/inker, respectively, they’ve delivered a pleasant fantasy series that hasn’t quite come together with this volume.  Each issue tells a story from a different time and place for the family, which allows a nice diversity of setups and scenery.  One story might be an action setpiece aboard a floating city-ship, while another might have the family matching wits with the Sphinx in the desert.  This is nice, but the stories themselves are fairly straightforward without any interesting twists to set them apart.

Emma’s art is nicely detailed and has a fluidity that sets it well apart from her father Andy and uncle Adam.  I can’t say that it elevates the story being told, but it feels well-suited to it.  While the stories told here are relatively self-contained, there is a feeling that they’re building towards something bigger involving The Seeker.  She’s a likeably fussy protagonist, and the Cat is wonderfully cat-like over the course of the volume.  Still, despite everything the creators do right, this first volume didn’t really grab me.  By its end I was left with the feeling that you could flip a coin as to whether or not things would come together or fall apart in vol. 2.  I may pick it up to see what the case will be, but I can’t recommend that anyone else do the same right now.