Sparkplug Highlight: Wicked Chicken Queen by Sam Alden

Wicked Chicken Queen is a story of birth and death,
loneliness and loss, told in two parts. An isolated island community discovers
an egg that hatches into an enormous chicken. The society flourishes under the
chicken queen’s rule, but is eventually destroyed in her death throes. The
mythical narrative of the chicken queen’s origin transitions into the narrator’s
portrait of her own life in a modern city: coffee with her daughter, laying
awake in bed at night thinking about her estranged husband, a lingering sense
of incompleteness.

The comic consists of single-page illustrations accompanied
by text. Alden depicts the constantly shifting geography of the island with
fluid, spontaneous lines, guiding the eye in a winding path through the little
vignettes of island life contained in each image. The use of graphite, complete with
smudges and erasures, gives the comic a sense of immediacy, as if you’d pulled
the pages out of the artist’s hands. Fans of Alden’s work will not be
disappointed with this trippy fairy tale.