Swan Songs is a collection of six comics loosely connected by the theme of the end of something, ie. the end of the world/a marriage/a sentence, etc. W. Maxwell Prince specialises in these kind of one-and-done comics collections - his Ice Cream Man series with Martin Morazzo has the same format and subversive, dark tone - but unfortunately Swan Songs isn’t one of his better books.
The End of World, drawn by Martin Simmonds, is about a guy getting a gardening magazine for his dying mother as civilization crumbles around him. Like the majority of these stories, Prince doesn’t do anything too surprising with the premise and the stories often play out quite forgettably, as this one does. I liked that final image at least.
The End of a Marriage, drawn by Caspar Wijngaard, is the story of a couple’s relationship and its demise as their divorce depicts them as mediaeval knights, samurai and superheroes battling. Again, the art is the star of this story.
The End of the End of the World, drawn by Filipe Andrade, is a plain boring story of the post-apocalypse with the worst art in the book.
The End of a Sentence, drawn by Caitlin Yarsky, follows a man who improbably likes madlibs, recently released from prison, whose brother ensnares him in a Point Break-style robbery. The ending is kinda cute in how it asks the reader to decide the character’s fate with madlibs of their own, though the comic as a whole feels like Prince came up with the ending first and worked backwards from there.
The End of Anhedonia (a lack of pleasure from life’s experiences), drawn by Alex Eckman-Lawn, is about a guy getting hypnotic treatment to help cure his condition. The story has the most interesting art in the book due to the dream-like world it takes place in, allowing Eckman-Lawn to play with surrealist imagery.
The final story is The End of the Sidewalk, drawn by Martin Morazzo, which is both an Ice Cream Man tie-in and a homage/parody of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. The comic is full of bad poetry telling the story of a man in a mental asylum and how it affects his wife and daughter on the outside. Really didn’t care for the terrible rhyming or the juvenile story - once again, the comic is saved by decent art with Morazzo drawing in a more spare, but still effective, style than he usually does.
I found Swan Songs to be unimpressive, dull reading without any standout stories and only the occasionally intriguing art saved it from being a total loss. Definitely only one for the die-hard fans of this author as it’s among his most forgettable collections.
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