Food Chain by Aimee Lockwood

Food Chain by Aimee Lockwood

I met Aimee Lockwood on my second day in The Lakes and I was charmed by her passion and excitement over comics, the talent she was surrounded by and the community gathering together. 

She didn't hard-sell her comics to me, but honestly, her friendly nature and obvious love of the medium would have likely led me to buy from her.

Except, I didn't need any of that, because the work she had for sale looked magnificent and I knew I wanted to buy everything she had the second I saw it.

Food Chain is an intriguing collection, filled with charm and warmth, bursting with innovative ideas, techniques and personality, and one that hides a few nice surprises which mark Lockwood as a talent to look out for on the UK's small press scene. 

From the first page of the opening titular story, Lockwood displays a talent for playing with the flow of words on her page - in one panel using a beam placed over a wooden tank as a convenient speech bubble, then following the flow of a wave of water, then swirling across her panel alongside schools of baby salmon swimming in unison. 

It works on some occasions and doesn't on others, but it always adds a sense of freshness which I hope Lockwood will retain as she progresses in comics.

Her mature sense of colour belies her relative newness to form and is a powerful tool here, genuinely adding depth to her work, with blues drenching her pages, flowing in and out of panels giving depth to the images of water that pepper the story and carrying our eyes all over her gorgeous artwork. 

When Lockwood makes herself (and her younger brother) the subjects of the story, she allows us to view it through their own wide-eyed, youthful wonder, lifting the sense of nostalgia the story is steeped in while never once letting it cross over into mawkishness. 

Food Chain is at once elegant, charming and educational, steeped in the emotional warmth that comes from someone letting their own memories and experiences wash over the page. 

Timmy is a lovely tale that pokes a little further past the nostalgic veneer we often allow our childhood memories. 

Lockwood continues to show her natural cartooning skills off here, playing with panel structures and layouts deftly. 

In Timmy, the rook her family rescued after a fall, she imbues a full personality in just a few short panels, allowing us as adults to appreciate the havoc he must have caused, one which the children of the house must have been blissfully unaware of at the time. 

This neat narrative trick plays out beautifully in the stories ending, one where we reflect on the lies adults tell children, and one where we stop to perhaps appreciate why a deceit like that might be necessary. 

Vector is a surreal departure from the two, stories we've seen so far and shows Lockwood is a creator who could have more strings to her bow than I might have first thought. 

Lockwood takes, what I'm rapidly coming to see as her own distinct appetite for experimentation to extremes here, telling a tale with a jagged and unforgiving narrative structure that is both dreamlike and nightmarish. 

Again here Lockwood's sense that colours and layouts are as much a part of her storytelling tool kit as words or images is on show and in fact here takes centre stage, with seeping reds creating a definite violent tone, and the frightening final panels effectively paying off the menace that nags at us throughout.

 

In The Enemy, Lockwood attempts to offer a more traditional comic narrative, without narration, and with multiple viewpoints. 

The story is an interesting one (and I imagine based on an actual experience), but it falls short somehow. 

I find myself interested in the characters, I want to know more about the girl, her relationship with her mother ("you're your own worst enemy girl") and I feel deprived of that at the story's climax. 

Again though, Lockwood is brave here, playing with a variety of ideas of how to present her unique narrative visually. 

Perhaps it doesn't fall short, but in presenting characters, and giving them voice, Lockwood has intrigued me, and when the story ends I find myself wanting to know before. 

That's a good thing.

Portgower is a classic ghost story, and one I'm happy to have read today (Hallowe'en). 

It's a well-trodden type of tale, but sitting so close to Lockwood's other autobiographical tales, it plays a neat trick on the reader until it's too late, dragging you into what, handled by a less able storyteller would have been a trite reveal, but here is a charmingly chilling bit of cleverness. 

Lockwood flexes her muscles a little here in terms of her artwork, and with a little more to go on in terms of scenery, she shows a good grasp on the power of Impressionism in sequential art to present objects and imagery in a recognisable yet stylised way. 

Tattoo is a neat way to finish, because more than anything it shows Lockwood has a lot more to offer.

It's a story driven by a neat idea, but it's more that that too. 

It has characters with backgrounds, with pains, with struggle, with stories to tell and with lives lived. 

It leaves me wondering what Lockwood will do when she unleashes her talents on a full length book and I definitely want to be around to see when she does. 

If this comic had ended up just being a collection of autobiographic stories - which honestly, I believed it would be after reading the first two strips - I wouldn't have been disappointed. 

Lockwood has a warm and unique voice that is engaging and powerful, that would have been enough to draw me in. 

But then she has this need to experiment, which is exciting. Her layouts can't be trusted to do what you think they should and her lettering rarely allows itself to be contained by such stuffy traditions as word balloons.

Her ability to use colour as something that genuinely adds another layer to the experience of reading her comics is something I'm deeply impressed by (not least because of my own incompetence with it but because it's not something you see often).

My delight in seeing her departure from autobiography into other interesting territories was palpable and I love the creepy Vector and campfire-esque Portgower. 

To finish on Tattoo was a master-stroke, because it leaves me very clear in my mind that Aimee Lockwood is a comic creator on the rise, one that's getting comfortable with her tools, but is already braver than a lot of people that have done this for years. 

That all adds up to someone who could go far, and while I sit happily waiting for the moment when the world and their wife are talking about 'breakout star' Aimee Lockwood, I'll be happily recommending Food Chain to anyone that will listen. 

You can find Aimee Lockwood on Twitter @AimeeDraws and you can buy her comics from her website www.aimeelockwood.co.uk