In fairly realistic pencil drawing, he tells a brief first person narrated anecdote about a girl and a squirrel. His piece is probably the most traditional in the book. I think he’s a Belgian (?) artist (based on some searches online). The anthology starts out with a short story by Ward Zwart, the one artist in the book I’m not at all familiar with. But that is all generalization on some level. They are more like flash fiction or poetry than short stories. Most of these comics are also not traditional narrative work. A number of the pieces make use of collage as well as abstraction in one form or another (though none are completely abstract comics). Most of these artists (and specifically the comics in this anthology) are working on the margins of comics. More importantly though, is what they share artistically. It would be tempting to try to group these artists together under some kind of label: many of them are friends/acquaintances (in her brief introduction Koch states as much) and have appeared in anthologies together before, many (most?) of them live or have lived in the Portland, Oregon area. If you are familiar with these artists you won’t be surprised by their work here. If you look at the list of contributors above, you’ll probably already have a certain idea of what this anthology will be like. Perhaps the free pdf model was not working out for them. The “free reading commons” links are there but I get stopped at a login. Many of their books (including this anthology) were available as free downloads, but that appears to no longer be the case.
They are a print-on-demand publisher who also offers their books as DRM-free ebooks (pdfs). It’s not a great anthology (but how many great contemporary anthologies are there?) but it is a good one and, perhaps more importantly, a pretty consistent one.Īrtist Aidan Koch edited this collection of comics from Publication Studio, a publisher that has not previously done any comics (which might partially account for how I’ve seen no reviews of this). My love/hate affair with comics anthologies continues… I was really excited for this anthology when I first heard about and then wasn’t too impressed the first time I read it. Featuring: Clara Bessijelle, Austin English, Dunja Jankovic, Blaise Larmee, Jason Overby, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Ward Zwart, and Aidan Koch Here’s the first of them…Īstral Talk, edited by Aidan Koch. In the next few weeks I’m hoping to post about a few of my favorite comics from the past year, focusing mostly on ones that I think were overlooked.
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