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Abstract affective allegory
Like all the books published by ShortBox, Jonathan Djob Nkondo’s After Laughter is a beautiful object, printed to a high standard, its bold, two-colour cover intriguing and inviting. The ShortBox website describes it as a ‘silent’ comic, which is to say it has no text. While I’m not one for policing the boundaries of genres… Read more
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Filmic mythology
If the daft comedy Raising Arizona was a film made of style, with Miller’s Crossing the Coen Brothers showed that the same basic material could still be used to construct something dark and serious, much as it had been in the Classical Hollywood era. Every shot, every line of dialogue, is crafted in homage to… Read more
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Habitable insouciance
I haven’t seen a great deal of James Stokoe’s work, but what I have seen has been right up my street. He contributed to Prophet, one of the most psychedelic recent SF comics, and he drew the cover for the first issue of Protector, a promising new series from Image which looks likely to find… Read more
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Socks off
Clever, metatextual movies don’t have to be intellectual or gnomic: sometimes they can just be hella entertaining. The most obvious way in which this occurs is through generic playfulness, which is the beating heart of Knives Out: ‘this is a murder mystery’ is written through it like the name of a seaside resort through a… Read more
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Lining up their ducks
The Clash were one of the first bands I got into as a teenager—late as usual, they broke up just before I started listening to them. I started with Combat Rock, then worked by way through the rest of their albums, learning the words and getting to know the recordings the way you do as… Read more
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Style over easy
Joel and Ethan Coen’s second feature-film, Raising Arizona stands in stark contrast to their first, Blood Simple. It’s an extremely silly movie, constructed from bright colours, slapstick, overacting, babies and optimism. It lacks the strong defining images that structure Blood Simple, but is nevertheless a very visual narrative, in which striking facial expressions and extravagant… Read more
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