Is Not Black Or White

A young artist, Tessa Stone has achieved what many other comic obsessed cartoon watching/drawing young folks often dream about: her webcomic, 'Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name', has become a big hit with a big fan following, with printed versions selling like mad and cosplayers of the characters running around in many cons. As a fan myself, I must say that this is well deserved- the comic is very well written, the characters are very likable and the artwork is really beautiful and eye-catching.
All of these factors are the reasons of the comic's success, and yet, I started thinking that there might be also another reason for this, but that might be because I was thinking about binary opposites too much because of the theme I chose for my essay...
Anyway, during the lecture, Ivan pointed out that the characters that fall into the 'anomalous zone' between the various binary opposites  are often found interesting by the public. And, looking at the characters of HiNaBN (even the abbreviation is a mouthful) and even at the story itself I start to think that I'm looking at a living (well, figuratively speaking) example of that. The setting and the plot of the comic is that this young guy called Hanna (whitch is not a boy's name, apparently) calls himself a 'paranormal detective' and apparently can do some magic by drawing runes and stuff. He's also usually escorted by a nameless but wise zombie and we are introduced a crew of other characters among whitch is an irratable vampire 'artfag', a werewolf girl and a shark-like son of a selkie.
Many of these characters fall into the anomalous zone and fit there perfectly, and actually do it in a somehow different way than I've personally seen before.

The zombie or {...} is probably the most obvious case of being in the anomalous zone, since he kinda resembles the Frankenstein monster Ivan was presenting as an example. He is between life and death, past and present, concrete and obscure, memory and oblivion, taking many roles in the story among which is of a narrator. While being nameless and seeing no value in names and not being too bothered by anything, including his obscure origin, he is still an important character with... well, character, who seems to develop more feelings for what is going on around him and what happened to him in the past as the story progresses. In terms of just about everyting about this character, he sits in the anomalous zone very comfortably.

Another interesting case is Conrad Achenleck, a shy, reserved, yet quite irritable and a with a bit of a temper who, after some unfortunante and a bit humorous events gone horribly wrong becomes a vampire. Sure, we have millions of other stories of 'your everyday guys' being vampires, and in most of them, they seem to be perfect prettyboys, especially in the infamous 'Twilight' series. And in those cases we have the prettyboys presented as something both of this world and the other, but that doesn't really convince anyone anymore. Yet Conrad is a person who a lot of people are painfully familliar with, and his ordeal of becoming a vampire isn't presented overly dramatically, yet is sad and obviously painful to the character, and little bits afterwards point to that the fact that he's a (weak fresher) vampire is still not entirely alright with him. While all of this was not explored more in depth after the first chapter, many things point to the story coming back to focusing on him hopefully. So, Conrad is an everyday guy turned vampire that is done right in my opinion and represents the weird limbo of a situation like that quite well, also putting him in the *~magical~* anomalous zone.

Besides them two, a few other characters also fit in the anomalous zone,  mostly because of their supernatural origins, yet they feel natural in the everyday enviroments of the comic. Hanna, the main character himself seems to have some intriguing baggage readers are not yet allowed to know about and in most recent pages, there have been interesting revealations concerning a new, but already popular character. But I digress.

All in all, the whole story seems anomalous-zoney to me atleast of what understand about such things. The author herself calls it 'sugar-coated horror' whitch explains the essence of the comic pretty well. It has a perfect balance between opposing poles- horror and suspense and lighthearted comedy - it's not overly dramatic and grim (though it has dramatic moments and is REALLY QUITE dark and grim at some parts of the story) and isn't a total comedy to the point of becoming parody or satire.
So, it seems that balance is one of the keys of creating succesful stories.
And that the anomalous zone contains quite fascinating things.