SamKeeper

Then Eve, Being A Force

Laughed At Their Decision



patreon

games, comics, and books


pfp by @girlpillz


the kind of essay comics published in The Nib tend to lean towards illustrative panel contents. the images show, basically, what the text describes. it's a way of producing comics that emphasizes clarity of information delivery and tends to have some level of redundancy, with relatively straightforward metaphors. there's a piece in the most recent "color" issue by Erlend Sandøy that bucks that trend in really extravagant fashion. the comic goes against an awful lot of conventional advice about clarity of panel layouts, often choosing sprawling nonlinear layouts or notional strips that run from top to bottom (see the two pages above). the metaphors also come thick and fast, and although most are straightforward there's enough just happening on every page that it enforces a kind of slower exploration of the details.

like, I love the way color (fittingly) and composition work in that second page. the smiling bike riders in the bottom catch me, they're discordant from the primary subject of the page, which is the failure of green parties in coalition to enact their plans and stick to their promises. what's harder to see at a quick glance is the third bike rider who's careened straight into the smog that makes up the frame. it's obscure enough in the print that I totally missed it and put my big dumb fat fingers over it when I was taking the photo! 😩 it's a fun little trick cause it takes the frame, which I think tends even when representational to recede into the background, into another area of panel content. but more than that it brings into sharper focus the overall rhetoric of the page: that green movements have achieved mainly small areas of apparent natural recovery, pushing the deeper structural issues to the margins of discourse, but those issues are inescapable.

(I do think the bit about the german greens totally failing to reduce coal power but succeeding in banning nuclear power is quite funny, like gosh do you think those two facts might have some causal relationship? ha ha oops)

the sprawling nonlinearity is also really well suited to a page like the overview of where green parties hold power, which IS a sprawling, informationally non-hierarchical subject. it sort of doesn't matter how the reader navigates this page and it's nice to see someone breaking from the McCloudian/Eisnerian focus on the sequence as be all end all. more than that, though, I just think it's clever and charming! What a good looking gosh darned page! composing the globe out of foliage and having pop out informational panels be branches with their own leaves? it's great stuff, a pretty immediately graspable visual device that's both pertinent and super flexible. there's all these interesting little details--like look at the ballots flowing out of the US like leaves stuffing that ballot box, juxtaposed with the text pointing out that first past the post means all these votes go, essentially, into the void. the image doesn't make that last bit clear, and the text doesn't spell out the leaf metaphor, it's a gestalt. that's comix, baby! awoo!

anyway I just wanted to shout this piece out as doing something special and exciting. the color issue is worth picking up if you get the chance, it's got a number of comics that feel a bit more experimental. the whole coverage within this comic in particular feels like a very even handed account of the green political movement's achievements and also some of its ideological failures--again, often conveyed not directly through fairly neutral text but instantiated in the art itself. check it out maybe!

edited cause I forgot the image descriptions 😔


You must log in to comment.