Today at TCJ, we've got a look at some comics from an interesting project currently amassing funds at Kickstarter. It's an anthology of comics inspired by folktales from the Oceania region, and we've got a look at it via the work of Brady Evans.
That's not all, of course--it's also high time for Noah Berlatsky to come by and grind his axe--or is it? It looks like Noah is getting his Roger Clemens on, because his take on Fiona Smyth's collected tome Somnambulance sounds pretty dang positive:
Normally, you'd expect such an expansive collection to feel disjointed, or at least heterogeneous. And sure enough, there is some variation; Smyth's first comics are relatively cramped; over time she started to play with color. But even with such shifts, Smyth's art is remarkably coherent over time, mainly because she's so dedicated to incoherence. From Somnambulance's earliest pages to its last, Smyth resolutely works to bend, fracture, and flat out ignore the "sequential" part of sequential images. Each overstuffed, vibrating, oversexed panel seems to freeze and burrow into the page or into your skull, distracting you from the next image, which, in turn, distracts you from the next, and the next. These are comics in which the panels don't so much work together as lovingly fight for dominance.
And while personal reasons (nice ones) call me away this evening, I'll leave you with a link to a comic that's been making the rounds, with good reason: Dakota McFadzean's Soon We're Both Screaming. It's lovely, painful, weird (and I hope, therapeutic) work. Have a wonderful weekend!
