Shenandoah Comics, Spring 2024

June 16, 2024 Shenandoah Comics, Spring 2024

The new issue of Shenandoah is live, and it includes three new comics by three wonderfully different artists whose visual approaches both contrast each other and draw rich connections.

Here’s a brief preview of each.

“Again Boy” by Helena Pantsis is the most pleasantly disturbing. It’s a surreal childbirth story that may belong in a genre by itself. Rather than plot summary, let me give you a bit of formal analysis — which is relevant because it interacts with the story content so well.

If you like the comfort of traditional panels and gutters and reading paths, “Again Boy” tosses those norms aside, leaving every image and caption unframed and each page a boundary-less open space. No two pages are quite alike either, except that the clusters of words always lead your eye between and through the images clustered aroung them.

Here are two pages to give you a taste:

Comics theorist Thierry Groensten coined the comics term “braiding” for visual motifs that repeat some drawn quality. Pantsis might be a textbook example. She repeats a pattern of concentric circles, it’s meaning changing with each rendering: birth canal, scream, black hole, some not-quite-physical portal of identity. The comic never defines the image in words, so its repetition weaves around the plot at a level of meaning outside of language.

Here’s a sampling:

“Beach Soliloquy” by MCK couldn’t be more different. The five pages are plotless (though in a weirdly good way), and no figure appears more than once.

There are no panels or gutter but the open spaces between lines represents mostly sand — a reason for yellow paper. There’s no narration either because all the text is tidbits of overheard speech. I snipped three examples:

A soliloquy is usually performed by a single character speaking their thoughts aloud on stage as if alone. Here the performance is a choral piece of fragmented dialogues that in combination stages a portrait of a place — or several places? I’m not sure if each page is a different beach or sections of the same beach. It seems significant that the difference doesn’t matter.

I also like the lack of speech balloons, allowing just the nearness of words to figures to indicate who is speaking. And if it’s not always clear, that’s even better because it’s all free-floating voices.

That freeness infuses the reading approach too. There’s no set order, or even preferable order. Like a stroll on a beach, roaming is the point. roam. And that produces all kinds of variable viewing paths:

“Hands” by Nick Mullins is an oddly touching war romance of sorts, or perhaps coming-of-age is a nearer description. Like “Again Boy” and “Beach Soliloquy,” it deserves it’s own genre.

The panels and gutter approach are closer to traditional comics, though not entirely. The Italian term for comics is fumetti, which also names the speech “clouds” or “smoke.” I admire how the comic braids various kinds of white clouds: the talk ballons, the steam from a cup of coffee (which also encloses the unspoken words that the narrator thinks), and the smoke from the train engine.

When the coffee steam repeats the last time, the change in style creates two kinds of white interiors too — which seems right for narrated memory. The title’s hand motif braids too, but while quietly experimenting with style changes that suggest increasingly interior mental experiences.