review of Sweetheart #3 by Austin English

 

I posted a lil bit on Austin English's great Sweetheart #3 over on We Like Books.

Sundays review in The Comics Journal

 

Rob Clough has a great review of the latest Sundays anthology - he likes the piece I did:

Unsurprisingly, the best strip in the book is Warren Craghead’s “(new, old)”.  He was one of the originators of comics-as-poetry and this particular piece is a wonderful fit in an anthology full of such stories. It also adheres to the anthology’s theme as it depicts the tide receding at a beach, with each page serving as a single panel showing the passage of time. Each page reveals more and more of the beach and its denizens, which he depicts with simple figures that almost look like a bundle of Ed Emberley-style drawings. In the midst of these figures, Craghead inserts a poem about the rising tide and the sounds it makes, which shows each letter rising, falling, and crashing like the surging water. It’s a lovely, evocative story that stirs all of the senses using the simplest of building blocks to create a complex reading experience.

He pretty much got what I was aiming at - the back and forth of the water in the sea, the waves crashing and the sliding water on the shore.  I'll hint at a secret - there's a reference to a famous poem in there too 9and it isn't Apollinaire). I don't have the piece online yet but I'll post part of it soon.

"O Percutor Harmonico" by André Lemos (review)

Based on Sergio Leone's 1968 Western Once Upon a Time in the West and drawn in André Lemos' characteristic heavy-brush style, O Percutor Harmonico is a sort of translation of the opening scene of the film, though not at all a straight re-telling. There are no words - in the art alone Lemos skates on the surface of Leone's work, picking and plucking and placing images in an order that creates something new alongside the original story.



O Percutor Harmonico opens with a Lemos version of the Paramount logo making it clear that he's drawing from a film. Once Upon a Time in the West is famous for being full of references to other Westerns so it works well that Lemos is choosing his own motifs and references to play with. A train, dusters, a windmill and of course, cowboy hats. There's also, just once, a harmonica, something very important to the original film.



This way of translation reminds me of a song by "Mole" called "Monument Valley. The lyrics are lines pulled from (I think) John Ford's classic Western Fort Apache, but they are similarly plucked and reshaped to make something that is certainly of the original piece but something wholly new as well.



Lemos' art fits the gritty dirty subject well with his careening violent brushwork. The images don't clearly or easily tell the story, but they add up anyway. There's a slim thread of a narrative (a train arrives, some guys face off, a gunfight), but Lemos doesn't open a window for us to gape though - he re-edits the film in ways that don't always seem to make sense and gives us an experience that we find, one that we piece together. This is close to an Eisensteinian way of making comics - drawing not only from film's more obvious narrative capacity but also from it's mysterious juxtaposing power.



I'm not sure how one could get O Percutor Harmonico other than to email Lemos directly though his Opuntia Books site. Here's a review by Portuguese critic Pedro Moura. O Percutor Harmonico is published by AO Norte. All these sites are in Portuguese. I should add that since I can't read Portuguese, and the essay in the book is in Portuguese, I may be missing something critical about the whole project. I like being confused though, so this language barrier has not been a problem for me.

All images © André Lemos. "Monument Valley" is © Mole - if you are Mole and want me to take it down I will but I couldn't find you online anywhere to ask permission. I hope you're ok with me spreading your glory.

Crabapple by Franklin Einspruch (review)

Crabapple, like many of Franklin Einspruch's other webcomics at themoonfellonme.com, is a sort of haiku - a freshly observed moment that unfolds and unfolds. He is a painter and it shows in both the beautiful handling of watercolor (the lively lines, the careful blending of colors, the spontaneously precise rendering) and in the observations the pieces are about. He sees things but finds them by making.

What isn't expected is his startling ways of making these images and words into comics. He is frequently subtle and sneaky in how he makes the pictures underscore the text and vice versa. In Crabapple, the first image is of a brown, almost crispy bush. No background, a line of brown (maybe dead rotten brown or maybe soil, sleeping, maybe waiting).



In the next image: the bush again, still brown but with green leaves, pink blossoms and a green carpet underneath. What amazes is the sky - this tree has blue sky all around and through it. The first tree was alone, separate, dead but this one is alive, penetrated and one with the world.



The final images in the piece, two similar pictures of flowers and leaves on branches take this theme further. The color of the leaves bleeds into the branch marking them as un-separate, as one. (The images I'm presenting here are out of context - the actual piece has a lovely side-scrolling motion, revealing itself as you look.)




His lettering also adds to the effect. In the first (all brown) text area the break of "down" where its ascender reaches up for the descender in the "P" of "pull" mirrors the image of the maybe-dead bush. The next text, after that beautiful tree image, is blue like the sky. The final text is green like the sprouted leaves.



This piece, like many others he has made, has such fresh observations and thoughtful, subtle ways of finding the world by making, is the best apology he could give.

All images © Franklin Einspruch