If our parents are good stewards of our educations, we read Art Spiegelman's Maus, with its Nazi cats and Jewish mice — the sine qua non of anthropomorphic graphic storytelling. Iron, with its tale of prey animals resisting the oppression of a predator regime after a long conflict, evokes both Maus and Animal Farm. What lends this story its power is the simplicity of the plotting in contrast with the complexity of the characters as they come to grips with their pasts and the paths before them. This holds true whether they are chasing the resistance, carrying out a well-laid plot, or claiming the mantle of a fallen comrade with disastrous results. The perma-winter setting, sparse watercolor art, frequent dialogue-free panels, and tense action between bunnies, goats, crows and tigers succeeds in drawing us into the darkness spawned by war and its offshoot, fear-induced complacency.
... And that's how I like my hot summer noir.
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