Thank goodness for graphic novels. For three years, acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) labored over a fantastically expensive sci-fi fantasy mythology film called The Fountain. It had Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett attached, a crew of over three hundred in Australia, and a glowing script review from Moriarty on Aint-it-cool-news.com.

What it didn’t have was a budget after the financiers backed out, even refusing to fly Aronofsky back to Australia (after an emergency meeting in LA to try and save the production) to fire his own staff. He bought his own ticket, let go of the team he had assembled and, by his own accounts, got a little depressed.

But he did have the rights to produce this graphic novel. Foreseeing difficulty in financing his grandiose vision for the film, he preserved those rights, allowing him to put his vision on paper if not on film. This novel, then, is the film The Fountain (soon to be released starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz) as he originally envisioned it.

We’ll see a slightly stripped down version when it’s released theatrically. After Aronofsky stirred himself out of depression, he remembered who he was (a low budget, indie filmmaker). He was famous for securing a bevy of $100 loans from a cadre of friends to finance his first film, Pi. So, when the monster budget version of The Fountain died, he rebirthed, re-imagined, re-wrote it into more indie-friendly waters.

You could call this graphic novel the first director’s cut to be released as a comic book. It’s a thrilling, spiritual, romantic, meditative, visionary trip. And I use the word trip specifically, because you’re not always sure where the story’s going or where it’s been. It’s not unlike riding in the backseat of the camper your parents are driving…you know you’re going to get somewhere cool, and you’re enjoying the sights out the side window, but darned if you can put it all together map-wise and figure out the exact route.

In a love story spanning time, a Spanish conquistador’s pursuit for the fountain of youth collides with a doctor husband in present day trying to save his cancer-ridden wife and a naked man hurtling through space in a futuristic bubble containing the tree of life. It combines Mayan mythology, a re-imagining of the Adam and Eve story, and a gritty medical survival tale.

The primary theme of the comic is death…how we face it and what is beyond. The cancer-afflicted wife tells her husband that death is the road to awe and that she’s at peace with going there. He’s not, though, and fights to find a cure to give him more time with her. Death is also the necessary precursor to rebirth.

Kent Williams’ lush paintings give a dreamlike, phantasmagoric sweep to Aronofsky’s script. The colors are lush in the Conquistador sequence, stripped and medical-plain in present day. The lines are loose so that the panels, words, and lines flow into and out of each other.

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