Category: Comics
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What would it be like?
This beautiful and moving short comic by Xulia Vicente (published by Shortbox, natch) is allegorical and speculative in equal measure. Since childhood, its protagonist Olivia has been able to see a female knight named Sierra, with a detachable head. Nobody else can see Sierra, but she is far more real…
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Plausibly grim
I found my way to the Snowpiercer comics by way of Bong Joon-Ho’s excellent 2013 movie, but they are legendary in their own right. These pioneering adult bandes dessinées, despite their fanciful science-fiction setting, are distinguished by a gritty and low-key style that was rarely found in comics in 1982…
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Doubling and singling
This is the second cook-book that I’ve read simply because it happens to be a comic published by Shortbox. Like the other one, Lucie Byron’s Food Baby, it’s aimed mainly at young people without a huge amount of culinary confidence or experience, cooking on a budget. In every parameter, I…
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Aesthetic constructions
Bryan Talbot is a national treasure of British Comics, with a career that stretches from his underground Chester P. Hackenbush strip in the 1970s, through some of the most iconic stories in 2000AD, his extraordinary science-fantasy epic Luther Arkwright, and a whole range of work for major publishers, to a…
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Stop and look
I’m still undecided what I think the precise aesthetic or narrative effects are of using anthropomorphic animals as characters in comics. They clearly invoke a long tradition, which is dominated by materials produced for children, but that tradition is so varied in its contents that the mere presence of such…
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Truth is no fun
This one-shot comic, which is the first book I’ve pulled at random out of what is to be the last box from Shortbox Comics (although the imprint will continue to release individual titles) could be summarised, I guess, as an allegorical body-horror short story. As allegory I feel it stumbles…
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Aesthetic symbols
Having been interested in comics for a very long time, I have of course been aware of manga. Until now, I haven’t read any, and my only knowledge of the genre has been second-hand, either through anime adaptations like Akira, or by reading what other people have written about it.…
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The source
Reading the second volume of Rebellion’s sumptuous collected Nemesis The Warlock has been a real pleasure. It hasn’t been a revelatory experience, in the way that reading the first volume was, as I have already been reminded what Nemesis is like, how good it is, and how mind-blowing its art.…
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A parabolic parable
I will freely admit my ignorance on all matters bandes dessinées. My first comics were Asterix and Tintin in French (inherited from my Francophone father), so of course I’ve always been aware of Franco-Belgian comics, but my developing obsession with the medium was nourished in its early days by British…
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Imagine if everything was exactly the same…
Imagine a world in which the tasks which once provided gainful employment to millions were increasingly carried out by automated devices animated by a mysterious and invisible force called AI. You may not think that you need to imagine very hard, and indeed that’s largely the point of Aminder Dhaliwal’s…
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Thematic weaving
I don’t know that it’s an intentional parallel, but the protagonist of Emma Hunsinger’s She Would Feel The Same experiences a kind of social opprobrium in respect of the way she conducts a relationship, and that kind of community coercion has clear echoes of the treatment traditionally meted out to…
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Radically obnoxious
I’ve never before re-read Nemesis the Warlock, unlike most of the other legendary 2000AD strips, so revisiting it in this lavish Rebellion re-issue (the first of two volumes) was both a pleasure and a revelation, and in some respects a disappointment. Having read these stories in my weekly prog I…
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A fairly tail
Well, that’s two ShortBox comics in a row with a cultivated visual naïveté. However, where Núria Martínez’s Outspace is very obviously a digital work, Charlotte Mei’s Pipette & Dudley: Charming Dog Adventure wastes no opportunity to foreground the physicality of its artwork, the texture of Mei’s thick impasto bulging off…
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Blandgorgeousartsampler
It’s common for a bunch of artists to collaborate on a series, but Madi (as far as I know) has only been published as a single album, and the different contributors are deployed to produce aspects of the book’s formal structure, rather than simply taking it in turns to draw…
Oliver Arditi 