Sarah Oleksyk, “Previously Possessed,” MySpace Darkhorse Presents, online issue 13, print volume no. 3, 2009. I guess MDHP was a really great anthology! I feel like every other one of these Notables have had that cover hanging up there at the top. Well, and here’s another one. Sarah Oleksyk is a BAC vet, and we Read More
People talk easily about “literary” comics (me among them), but there are books for which that comparison is truly apt. Danica Novgorodoff’s Slow Strom is one of those. A story of an unexpected encounter between two out-of-place characters (a female firefighter and an illegal Mexican immigrant) in a giant storm, the work evokes contemporary American literary fiction and independent film. It’s low-key, but with passion simmering under the surface.
Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes is another one of those almost-indescribable works which we seem to like a lot (she figures out after having to try to describe a whole bunch of them). A blank-faced guy and a scribble-headed guy walk through various landscapes, tell jokes, encounter tall hipsters, robots, guys in suits, the occasional woman, and god—who owns a laundromat/health club/daycare center on the Southwest Side, apparently.
“Delia’s Love” is a story of down-and-outness and complicated romantic ans sexual history. It’s told sensitively, and with subtlety, despite the sometimes harsh subject matter. No character comes off as either entirely hero or victim, and that’s how I like it.
This story is about young Corinne and her imaginary witches. Although it’s drawn in a sort of whimsical, children’s book illustration style, it’s really genuinely affecting on an adult level. Maybe it’s because I can imagine my own daughter having fears like this in a few years, it’s hard not to imagine how truly terrifying these witches must have been for Corinne.
A book/world made of more-or-less interrelated short stories that mix banal everyday rhythms with the absurd and the psychedelic by an author to keep an eye on.
A series of variations and transformations of what is perhaps the single most-parodied page of comics ever, the famous “Insult that Made a Man out of ‘Mac'” comic used to advertise the Charles Atlas correspondence bodybuilding course in old comic books. The original comic is opened to new vistas of post-modernism, literary allusion, absurdist humor, and even a touch of the poetic.
The thrill of reading Andrei Molotiu’s abstract comics is in watching images and rhythms and hints of narrative coalesce and then dissolve as you read. And each time you re-read them you get a different experience.
Maggie McKnight’s “Swingin'” is a glancing look at a few moments in her life tied together by a family wedding. I especially like how McKnight fluidly interlaces flashback with various contemporary incidents, and how she lets little bits of information pile up without comment to organically create our sense of the event.
This story reads like either the last few or first few pages of a great Mike Mignola occult adventure tale. Perhaps he plans more of the Witchfinder adventures? Oh, wait, that’s exactly what this is: a prequel to the Witchfinder series now running. In classic Mignola style, it inserts a presumably completely fictional character, and (obviously) fictional occult doings, into actual history, in this case, in Victorian England. This opens up new frontiers for him of telling 19th-Century analogues to his Hellboy stories.
