COMIC BOOK
The Gist: Brain Candy For Jaded Cartoon Buffs
$16.95
Regardless of the language, the enigmatic stories in the Dutch comic magazine Eiland are inherently hard to decipher. But at least artists Stefan van Dinther and Tobias Schalken are making their work more accessible by exporting it to the States and translating it into English.
The US debut, installment #3 in the series, contains 12 beautifully detailed vignettes. "Chrz 2. Allegro" traces the tangled lines of passion and intrigue in a seaside town. Half the town is rendered in color, and the other half is depicted in black and white, as if to suggest that even our closest neighbors live in a world that's foreign to us. Van Dinther also plays with themes of intimacy; in one scene, a woman looks into her lover's "thought balloon" and catches him fantasizing about another woman.
Apparently straightforward stories turn out to be anything but. In "Allow to Infuse," a man making tea is shot in the head. The bullet exits the back of his skull, circumnavigates the globe, and reenters his head. He continues steeping tea, the steam drifting up from his cup to become continents on another planet. It sounds whimsical and simple, but I've returned to this story periodically for three weeks, each time noticing potent new details. The measure of the story's cleverness is its balance - it's obscure enough to keep its intentions masked, but not so subtle that you turn away in frustration.
Amazingly, the artists create a distinctive graphic vocabulary to tell one story and then discard it for the next. They also play with comic conventions. Thought balloons stretch, mutate, and become objects in the physical world. Captions refuse to refer to the drawings next to them, instead wandering off into their own separate narratives. Characters fade out of the background and enter blank, parallel worlds.
Each story pushes the reader to sift through ideas from coded clues of juxtaposition, color, and shape. Which brings me to my only criticism: Given that the stories require so much study, telling some of them in a multi-issue serial format only makes each comic's message more difficult to understand. Yet returning to mainstream comics after visiting Eiland makes you appreciate its value: You're suddenly aware of what the medium could be if artists approached every blank page as mysterious, unexplored territory.
Bries: +31 (20) 4278632, www.eiland.cc.
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