The Pirates of Pangaea: Book 1 by Dan Hartwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Like H Rider Haggard. But with dinosaurs.”
That was how I described this dynamic and rather wonderful comic from the team of Daniel Hartwell and Neill Cameron; the Pirates of Pangaea gives us boy’s own adventures, cut from the pages of those delicious 1950s stories of derring do, mixes it up with a bit of H Rider Haggard, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and if that weren’t enough, there’s also dinosaurs.
I really liked this. I talk a lot in my reviews about books knowing the space within which they work and owning that space. Children’s literature, comics, young adult literature, everything I review, they all talk to each other. They all exist as part of this great dynamic system of expression; a stone thrown into the pond and the ripples rolling out a thousand fold. And that’s one aspect of what I mean when I talk about space; the dialogues between texts. The way one text finds an echo in another; the way one novel talks to that and vice-versa.
Another aspect of space, though,is the idea of the book itself. The page edge. The limit of the bookish space. The part where the book ends, practically. The page corner. The front cover. The part where the world stops being book and starts being something else. The sofa. The table. The floor. (Get your books up off the floor, please, thanks)
This part of space is particularly pertinent for picture books and comics because they can push all the way up to that edge. A novel will always have white space around the text due to typsetting, but visual media? It can push that edge. It can spill story all the way out and into the world, and this is where The Pirates of Pangaea shines. It’s a big book. It’s a big and storied and strong book; the story doesn’t just live within its pages, it’s everywhere. The visual coding of this book is so strong. I believed it. Boats ride on the back of dinosaurs, land-borne craft over the sea of green, people ride dinosaurs and I believed it. All of it.
It’s all true.
I spoke at the start of this review about the authorly echoes The Pirates of Pangaea stirred up in me; it’s a comic of finding yourself in a world where you have to, because there’s nobody else to do it for you. Sophie, one of the lead characters, is cut from a very distinct cloth; she’s brave, occasionally gobby, quick-witted and I rather love her.
There’s another fine detail of The Pirates of Pangaea that I want to highlight, as it speaks again to me of that great width of this comic, the way it exists in a space so much larger than it may seem to initially inhabit, and that detail comes at the little note at the start of each chapter. Each chapter’s introduced with a double sided page, coloured in that evocative note of antique and yellowing parchment, with a map on one side and a dinosaur on the other side. Each side is noted in pencil with little notes which speak of lived experience. This is clever, clever work; it’s not letting any part of the book-space go to waste, and it’s making every inch of it work for your narrative.
This is good, good stuff.
Daisy May Johnson 