comics
hurrengoa

mr. Punch

Neil Gaiman and Dave Mckeen. The creators of the famous Sandman. Two giants of English comics. Émigré have dresssed up the comic with their typography. Photos, collage, drawings. The use of different artistic means in comics.
An adult talks us through images and events of his childhood. He tears the innocence of his infancy apart and we see things as they were when we read between the lines. The monsters a child doesn’t see are shoved in our faces. There’s no hiding anything here.
As this all unfolds we are treated to a play by the puppet Mr Punch. Our protagonist is quite scarey, so we get the story in small doses. We see the harshness of the adult world. Mr Punch is an evil and nasty character that comes alive with the youungster’s right hand and frightens the child into escaping. The dark relationships between adults, the birth of a sister or the death of someone in the family however, provoke nothing more than distant feeling in the child’s heart.
This comic is built around illustrations, it’s static. The strength of the story is in the text. The intensity between the two elements is sometimes lost. The text enables the story to be told. It slowly takes you from one illustration to the next. There is a lack of rhythm. The story has its ups and downs at times. The fight between childhood and adulthood.
21 euro (doesn’t sound much in euros)

hurrengoa

maus 2

I can’t think of a reason why I should explain the first part. That’s what the editorial’s for. This second part comes with the first. A Maus pack. Maus is basically a biography of Art Spiegelman. What his parents went through during Nazi times would affect his comings and goings. Two threads with which to stitch his life together. The underlying violence of the story is sometimes hidden beneath a coating of tender aesthetics. It’s as if the nazicats and jews-mice try to make what happened smell of roses. If Sylvester the cat were to gas 5 million Tweety Birds, we would, at least, see the funny side of.

hurrengoa

la mazmorra

The latest adventures from the little animals in the castle. The reading of this comic will spring another thousand connections to mind. Warner’s cartoons, insipid stories of Princes and Princesses, role-playing games and the way American cinema makes glossy versions of everything. They take the mickey out of all that type of iconography. This conjours up many images as we watch these little devils fight amongst themselves. "I’ve read these stories somewhere before". Deja vü time and time again.