Author: Alexander Danner

Exciting, boundary pushing comics, particularly webcomics don’t seem to be as common as they once were.  Some experimental creators have moved on to more mainstream projects, some have stopped making comics.   And some comics that once were daring in their format, like Dinosaur Comics, have just ceased to seem experimental as they’ve become mainstays of the webcomics scene.  That last is a good thing, of course—normalizing ideas that were once bold is how the doors to further new ideas are opened wider.

Of course, unusual projects do still come along, so here are a few that have caught my notice recently.

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As a fan of comics that tell complete stories with solid conclusions, I tend to believe that the best time to read a webcomic is after it has wrapped up entirely.  With that in mind, here are several very interesting webcomics that will be wrapping up in the foreseeable future, making now a good time to bookmark them.

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Here are four very different comics I’ve read and enjoyed in the past few months, from four different countries outside the US.  No particular reason, other than it’s nice to broaden your horizons now and then.

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Photography by Jason Fulford, Kristin Sjaarda, Leanne Shapton, Michael Schmelling, and Derek Shapton.

What is the value of a memory?  What is the value of a single moment shared between two people?  Does the worth of an affectionate gesture outweigh the cost of a petty unkindness?  When does the price of love become too high?  These are the central questions of Leanne Shapton’s inventive second book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, a book in which each moment in the affair of two lovers comes with a price-tag clearly affixed.

Important Artifacts takes the form of an auction catalogue, the shared and individual possessions Lenore Doolan and Hal Morris splayed out, photographed, organized, and appraised with an unsentimental eye; we are to witness the posthumous dissolution of Love’s estate.  Is the first known snapshot of the couple, taken at a Halloween party in 2002 worth $25 – $30?  Is Doolan’s hand-drawn Valentine’s Day dinner menu worth $50 – 60?  To whom?

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I’ve been very much enjoying Liz Baillie’s Freewheel, a sort of Alice’s Adventures in Hobo-Wonderland, about a runaway foster child named Jamie on a quest to find her missing older brother, Jack.  At the moment, Jamie is lost in a series of tunnels, which can only be traversed by following a series of arcane rules that no one has taken the time to explain to her.  As a result, she is now at the mercy of Wrigley and Chewbie, a pair of odd, but seemingly well-meaning tunnel guides, who insist that Jamie must be blindfolded (more seemingly-arbitrary rules) if they are to help her find the next gate along her way.

Here’s a page from the blindfold sequence:

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Found via Boing Boing, illustrator Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi has adapted two short sequences from the books of pop-science author Mary Roach.  The newer piece, taken from Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, details the stages of human decomposition, juxtaposed against a trip to a sushi restaraunt.  It's a great way of evoking the unsettling images of human decomposition without actually showing the literal process.

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