The Mini Comic Library

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL comics at their very best make us feel less alone in the world, opening their hearts and their memories to us and inviting us to share the things that made them laugh, cry, or just feel alive. I've found writing about Robert Brown's wonderful Killjoy series difficult. I actually found myself resisting starting to read it. I didn't realise why until recently.  In Killjoy , Brown has achieved something remarkable and something that I am deeply envious of.  In his good, honest, slice-of-life storytelling Brown has created a resonance that I would very much like in my own work and find myself reaching for often. It's a simple model. Brown tells us stories of varying length from his childhood - stories about growing up, siblings, parents, first girlfriends and best friends, rules and taboos and breaking them - and successfully weaves a spell that carries us back to our own childhood, to our own first kisses and fleeting romances and asks us to remember agai...

Elegant simple cartooning coupled with a smart, dry wit with a poignant edge, proves, that while in space no one may hear you scream, they sure as hell might hear you laugh.  Chris Baldie's It's Dark Out Here is a beautiful study in silent humour, playing off sharp puns with a keen science-based edge, to leave his audience smiling gleefully.  A lot of its power to please comes from the effortlessly uncomplicated style he renders his hero in, a moustachioed spaceman - clearly the blueprint for his Space Captain character - who floats alone in the void, keeping himself busy with a variety of mundane activities bought to comedic effect by the nature of his situation. Whether he's changing light bulbs in the stars, painting landscape 'studies in black, checking his online dating profile or even pulling out a Hoover for a vacuum gag that while predictable  is perfectly and cleverly delivered across the small, neat, four panel grid Baldie chooses - at first glance a simple ch...

PARALLEL narratives echo in tandem across the stark and eerie world of Amber and Chelsea: The Beginning like two heartbeats thudding loud in an empty void. Hamilton and Alexander use the 'double journey' narrative here to great effect, forcing the audience to accept events as they are presented to us, in the first instance in Chelsea's haunting monologue.  In a world, clearly torn to shreds by something, Chelsea sits waiting in an empty devastated flat, almost as though he is waiting for us, for someone to listen to him. His cheerful disposition is almost unsettling in this environment - emphasised by Hamilton's strong use of white space and panel composition  - but we are a captive audience and he has something to say. Hamilton's artwork is striking, deftly moving from intense blacks and complex cross-hatching which suggest something erratic and jagged about Chelsea, and warmer, smudged pencil marks, which have the effect of moving our protagonist in and out of foc...

A SLY humour woven into a touching and absorbing memoir of his grandmother, I Blame Grandma by Joe Decie is an astounding accomplishment given that it was competed in less than 24 hours at this year's Lakes Comic Art Festival.  Like the rest of the 24 hour crew from that year, the level of craft on show here is impressive, but as with each of his contemporaries, Decie has an individual style which stamps him as unique.  Setting his stall out from page one ("My grandmother invented the paper clip"), Decie weaves an intriguing narrative, just strange enough to be true. His wonderfully observed artwork has the look of faded photographs, the dreamy watercolours blurring at the edges like soft focus backgrounds, adding a hint of realism and retreating memory to his story (and setting us up neatly for his punchline). His scenery, while fluid enough to let us fill in the gaps ourselves, feels keenly observed, and I'm left wondering whether he used references (and enviously ...

NIGHTMARISH and macabre, Craig Collins and Iain Laurie's Crawl Hole is a disturbing, dark and devilishly funny book. The cover, which hints at the pair's countryman Frank Quietly, and depicts sharks circling around a diver should have been warning enough that these were two creators who scented blood and were going in for the kill, yet it was with innocence and naïveté that I opened their comic on my commute. Like a cup of coffee laced with rat poison their assault on my post dawn malaise was ruthless, the dark, twisted tales they tell worming their way into my memory, taking root and promising to haunt me for weeks to come.  As a child I was terrified by the covers of the HP Lovecraft books on my mother's nightstand and Crawl Hole made me shiver in memory of that fear deliciously.  Laurie's art is visceral and reaches into something primal inside. It's also beautifully detailed and intricate and flicking back through the book I found myself enjoying some of the fin...

So I'm changing the name. Someone I respect and trust told me they found it off putting and I'm still desperately trying to get my Reviews in Brief (RIBs) acronymn over, so I'm going with Comic Ribs. It's my blog, sue me .   For those who weren't here last month, this is a space to collect my thoughts on single issues as I read them in a short form that keeps me writing regularly (ahem) and uses some of the skills I learnt as a journalist (writing NiBs ... or News in Brief ... I'm labouring that, right?). The format remains a single post per month, which I will edit with brief reviews (briefer than last time I hope) that I write as I read (and I'm fully aware how late I am reading some stuff). So, with the scene set, the groundwork laid, and the rod for my back thoroughly created, welcome to  Comic Ribs ... or Reviews in Brief - March 2015    Sex 20 - Joe Casey, Piotr Kowalski, Ian Mcewan - Image  Sex 20 is a tour de force of characterisation that delves de...