Guest Review: *@$! ME ! THIS IS GOOD !

Yes. A review.  This time by the man who put sex into Zines -Mr Paul Ashley Brown, UK Small Press god and football self-injury specialist.

Over to you, Golden Balls!
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"Swear Jar" by Abe Christie

AveryHill Publishing. 

40 pages 

B4 

Colour/B&W  

£6

It's very rare these days I'm moved by anything in comic book form. All too often there seems a continual heralding of some new brilliant auteur, wrapped in the Emperor's New Clothes of the Graphic Novel form so beloved by easily led idiots. 

If you want to find anything worthwhile that has a certain bite, look beyond the gutless middle-classness of the Graphic Nawful to the lower rungs of the independent small press and zine world, where creators ploughing their own self-made furrows are developing their own new comic book landscapes. Here's where the new frontiers of pictoral narrative will emerge, and an exciting pathfinder is here in Abe Christie.

I know virtually nothing about him, which makes his discovery all the more exciting. I first came across him when a friend of mine showed me a small, self-published A6 full colour zine of his, which is reprinted in this collection. I immediately felt an affinity with his work, in it's story of an isolated figure, seemingly marooned on an empty planet, and his introspective musings on the end of his relationship with the friend he loved. It's seemingly a straightforward story, yet the isolation of the figure withinn a barren landscape echoes the character's inner longing and reflection, a stark desolation of feeling and loss, as well as his physical distance from humanity. It's brilliant in it's simple beauty and the emotion it conveys.


The majority of the "strips" or stories within Swear Jar follow a similar pattern or theme, an isolated figure indulging in some kind of self-reflection or introspection regarding their fate, wondering how life may pan out, or how they've reached the point we find them at. A six-page story at the start of the book features a lone female figure simply walking along while a disembodied narrator charts her life to the point at which she is ending it all. There is little detail in Christie's drawings, his figures are abstracted shapes, rarely with distinguishable features, stuck in simplified barren landscapes, yet this emptiness of detail reinforces the emotional charge of the writing, it's often contemplative thought peppered with both the poetic and banal. The seeming emptiness of the drawing has the effect of allowing you space as a viewer to be drawn in to the emotional resonance of the words, a visual subservience that rarely plays out in comics, the visuals often the dictatorial element.

While it sounds like it may be serious or self-indulgent, Christie offsets his emotional introspection with a deadpan sense of humour. It's no surprise to find a character in the main story here, "Hank Cork Comics" mention the film-maker Aki Kaurismaki. The Cork story has a similar feel to one of his movies, a droll, off-kilter absurdity of a strip, where Hank bicycles off to meet and rescue the Girl of His Dreams from his Nemesis, someone called Jean. Along the way, he bumps into two friends, and eventually gets to the house where the object of his desire is apparently held or hidden. It reads like a surreal comic fairy-tale, a non-quest with a non-ending that seemingly goes nowhere, but again, beyond the good-natured ordinariness of the previous humour ("One time my nemesis convinced me to donate a testicle for charity ! It's true I have a scar !) there's the sad emotional punch of the final line in the strip, as Hank muses that " it's a long way home without a bicycle.... and some kind of empty heart."

Christie's work is oblique, absurd, funny and deadpan, emotionally engaging and thoughtful. If one wanted to be harsh ( and I don't really) you could argue it's narrow in it's content,and the drawing could be better, more detailed, the character's more delinated to allow a greater emotional attachment to be carried by them. But that's probably missing the point somewhat. I like the sketchy immediacy of the drawing, it's both impressionistic and expressionist, carried off by his minimalist colour palettes on the stories. And the stories carry an emotional weight and resonance in the language he uses, obtaining a thoughful profundity, even if I wonder if it's entirely intentional. offset as it is by the occasional humour.

Anyway, I love what he's doing, and I hope we see more of his original, idiosyncratic talent soon and often.

Paul Ashley Brown