Category: Comics
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Beautiful, beautiful violence
Many comics today feature anthropomorphic animals, or animal-headed humans, as do animated cartoons, prose fiction and other media. Anyone writing a history of this practice would probably start with Egyptian deities, or with the lion-headed palaeolithic Löwenmensch figurine, but as I know very little about the topic I have no…
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A dark, involute surface
Monstress is pretty much the only commercial comics series I’m following, other than 2000AD and its associated properties. I enjoy it basically for Marjorie Liu’s straightforward fantasy storytelling and Sana Takeda’s absolutely sumptuous art: it’s something I can enjoy as entertainment without having to think about it too hard. Its…
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Insightfully commonplace
I was initially underwhelmed by Michelle Theodore’s Cavity. Where were the insights? Where was the peek into an unfamiliar experience? Where was the pleasure and escapism? Then I re-read it, and realised that I had resisted its affect and dismissed its perspicacity because the subjective experience it represented was so…
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Dwelling together
A labyrinth can be a lonely place. In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Asterion, the most famous of labyrinthine inhabitants, is consoled in his solitude only by a prophecy that his redeemer will some day seek him out. That redeemer, the son of Aethra, fathered by both Aegeus…
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Complex simplicity
This sweet-natured, simple tale of friendship and love is as straightforward as comics get – except that it’s completely backwards. Unusually for an English-language publication, it’s laid out as a manga, running from right to left, from the front cover, through each page, to its conclusion. When I first picked…
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A fable for the devouring
This book smells great. It’s a slim, perfect-bound volume, in a tall, narrow, custom format, printed to a very high standard, its pages heavy with dark ink. I want to eat it. Its physicality, its insistent presence as an object, is paralleled, and probably produced in part, by the solidity…
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A moment
This small, landscape-format book contains a lot of landscape, and a lot of episodes in which people engage with landscape. Its cover shows the narrator, closely aligned to, but clearly non-identical with the author, Jen Lee, who is not a bipedal cow; she is sitting alone and contemplating a rural…
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Other truths in the shadows
I got stressed out reading Logicomix. About halfway through the book there is a discussion of Russell’s paradox, a self-contradictory proposition in set theory. Very simply, it posits a set of all sets that do not contain themselves. At the time he stumbled upon it Bertrand Russell, whose biography Logicomix…
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A pamphlet in disguise
A book is illustrated if it has pictures in it. A history is illustrated if the events it constructs are shown in the pictures that accompany it. Admittedly not everyone will sign up to my definitions, but I’m not too convinced that Portraits of Violence fits the second of them.…
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So long and thanks for all the comics
The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more. Clearly, during the course of his career writing comics, Alan Moore was far from silent, so it…
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Life grooves
Jaime Hernandez often uses techniques that seem cinematic; in fact they are no more proper to cinema than they are to comics, but some narrative tactics are available to both fields that have no direct analogy in other story-telling media, known in cinema by terms such as framing, focus, depth…
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A gently chromatic narrative
The Island is a short and beautiful allegory. It’s a simple exploration of solitude, of withdrawal, of re-engagement, and of the fear we may feel of aspects of ourselves. The story is told with a minimum of dialogue, and a lot of delicately shaded crayons. It’s a consequence of the…
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Mutually constituted histories
British commercial comics have always been an idiosyncratic little world, in comparison to the vast American scene with its division of labour, standardised conventions, and industrialised processes. When 2000AD came along in 1977 it was written by a bunch of iconoclasts and radicals, determined to see what they could get…
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Between mnemonic quanta
The principal characters in Jaime Hernandez’s long-running Locas series are, I guess, the same age as him, which is to say around ten years older than me, but when I first encountered them I was roughly the age they are at the beginning of the narrative, and I have grown…
Oliver Arditi 