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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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I pulled out issue #2 of this minicomics series first, and read it all the
way through. “Ah, I get it!” I exclaimed in the direction of my
window, hoping that a passing neighbor would hear my cries and become my
friend, “This series is obviously going to feature stand-alone stories
that work with recurring images and symbols! I have figured you out,
comic!” I was very pleased with myself, and I immediately bought myself
something to maintain my happiness.
The storyline contained in these four books (all of them containing
twenty-one pages of story and low-end minicomics production value: white
folded paper, stapled, copied, the issue number and price written on the
upper right hand corner in what looks like pen), The Story of Suave
Prospects, is initially obscure but fairly easy to discern upon a second
reading. A very large woman approaches an ancient temple and proceeds to
give birth, in succession, to the four children in her womb. Each one
emerges fully clothed and enters the temple through a crack (one birth
following another?), revealing a nattily-decorated environment filled with
weird objects and items. One ‘child’ (while smaller than their immense
mommy, they appear as normal-sized young adults) finds a coffin with a happy
face attached to it. He opens it and finds a lovely woman holding a water
bong and a potion. He climbs in. Another child opens a trap door, only to
discover a woman’s ass (high-heels on her feet). A large plant grows out of
her anus, which delights him. And the rest of the story follows the same
track, chronicling the discoveries of all the children, occasionally
intercut with the quest of a wandering fellow with a staff and a hat who
goes to a bar that located in a beached whale, and eventually becomes as big
as the woman from the beginning as the storylines dovetail.
Fox is much more effective when he keeps it simple, like at a confrontation
with a hookah-smoking butterfly in a mushroom patch on a clear day, or in my
favorite sequence, where a stick-figure cat on the label of a bottle of
booze springs to life and does a little dance. His more ambitious layouts,
such as a sequence in which a character makes a trail of fire in the sky
with the flame of a candle only to reveal a six-armed woman fluttering
within, basically succeed on a “Well, he’s certainly trying,” level,
rather than the plane of “Wow, what a sight!” But readers might be
inclined to give credit for trying; the idea is certainly a nice one, and
there’s a handful of great moments of perfect abstract sense, like forming a
wall from a fingertip of melted wax off a burning candle, then shrinking
down and climbing up it to reach the candlewick, and the mysteries that lie
within. Simple!
So in the end, it looks to me like the story is about sensual and religious
and spiritual delight, all ensconced in a tower of flesh (us?). Suave
prospects indeed, at least until the whole thing is squished by folks who’ve
gotten bigger than that. It’s a decent work in intent, one willing to soak
in symbols and subconscious notions, though the execution makes one largely
hopeful for the author’s future than necessarily satisfied with the work at
present. There needs to be more technical work, more clarity in display, as
clarity of display will be needed to convey the sort of image-heavy
collective daydream that Fox wants to bring us. Still, check out the above
link, see what you think, and maybe look into this imperfect work.
-- Jog
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Earth Minds Are Weak #1-4
Ah, but I wasn’t quite correct, as I’ve now realized having read the entire
series. The brainchild of Justin J. Fox, also an interesting online critic
(I particularly liked 
You’ll probably want to buy all four issues together, just to get the whole
story; contrary to my initial opinions on the self-contained nature of issue
#2, there’s really quite little satisfaction to be had in simply reading one
of these books. Indeed, by the time issue #3 rolls around, the story no
longer feels structured at all to fill a single comic; it simply stops when
the pages run out, with a character in mid-stride, then picks back up at the
top of issue #4. But for $6, you’ll be getting 84 pages of comics. And as
comics they’re not too bad, although Fox runs into some periodic trouble
with foreground-to-background differentiation, the black space of the former
melting into the latter, creating an unclear look (not a good thing for a
wordless book at all). The busy background design of the interior of the
temple (wood paneling and stone flooring and bricks and things) becomes
convoluted, though Fox cleverly tries to keep his character designs as
simple as possible, for offset purposes.
He does manage some nice detail in
rendering some (again, seemingly Woodring-inspired) wild plants and pulsing
organic masses, layers of skin patterns throbbing, though some of his use of
white space to indicate certain textures isn’t as good, creating confusion
with his backgrounds rather than clarifying the dimensions and solidity of
his forms.