InCas_ of Emergency

So, in many recent years, there's been a massive fall PDF sale run by an on-again/off-again comics publisher called Shortbox. The gal who runs it, Zainab Akhtar, has a tremendous sense of taste and is plugged in to scenes of emerging cartoonists in a way that seems implausible, so the offering is always rich in this very particular overlap of weird/high-quality/unobtainable/inexpensive.

I think they're taking this year off, but keep an eye out in the future.

Nina Vakueva — Dream Loop (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. Lightweight but very nice looking.

MIUWN — How to be a Good Human (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A cryptic little scented-vinyl nightmare.

Serena Cirillo — Joy (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A girl absorbed in a work deadline builds a droid to help clean out the squalid family house she's moved back into.

I liked this a lot, it's got this old quiet one-off manga feel. You know how sometimes a really top-quality scanlation team will make a point of picking the most off-path stuff they can find, just quiet oddball things with almost no chance of a commercial translation? This feels like one of those. Hmm, I guess that was a really vague description in spite of its specificity. Anyway, it's quiet and contemplative and pretty. I thought the bridge scene in the middle where Joy is looking at Mari's old family photos and perceptual time comes to a halt was really striking and effective.

Mapurl — Injest (comics)

Jan 21

2025 Shortbox haul. I liked this a lot! A dark little story with a very pleasing shape.

Asia Miller — Jubilee (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. This was berserk, I loved it. A librarian with a pillbug motif joins up with a sluttily-dressed bounty hunter, and then a bunch of Incal-lite shit happens.

Pupi — To Buy a Forest (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. Slice of life. Not bad. "Burocracy..."

Fortune's Fool, Tess Powel — The Last Wizard of Cwmdafi (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. This comes in both English and Welsh versions, which is rad. Woman moves back to her grandpa's hometown to take over his wizarding business. Small town small business slice of life. Good ol' Cupboard Cat.

Erin Roseberry — Fallen into the Garden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Another lovely little SF comic by the author of The Maker of Grave Goods, this time featuring lesbian dogs.

lilyresh — Flood Water Maiden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Sort of a medium-dark mood piece in an ongoing catastrophic flood. Not bad, though it kind of trails off.

Jeff Noon — Falling Out of Cars

Mar. 21

It’s been a long time since I read anything by Jeff Noon, but he loomed large in my experience of the ’90s. This one was a Joanne McNeil rec.

Took me a tentative age to work through this, with many interludes of putting it away for months. This is intense psychedelic SF in a sort of tone-poem mode, and it’s in large part about dementia. It’s very beautiful, and intensely irritating and unpleasant to the touch; there has been a global and permanent outbreak of a strange physical and metaphysical sickness (sometimes called the Noise), and effectively it has fractured the entire world into a single vast Alzheimer’s ward with no nursing staff in sight. The effects of this scenario on the narrative voice and the momentum of the story are brutal. Most of the people we see are stumbling blearily on, drunk on loss and pain and dissatisfaction, and only intermittently capable of maintaining a train of thought or a thread of purpose.

Our protagonists, at least, are on a quest; a rich man who blames the current state of the world on a single great sin has sent them in search of broken shards of a magical mirror. The shards and their magic are real; it’s unclear whether the rich man is right about their connection to the Noise’s origin, but it’s very clear that the world’s fall cannot be reversed.

I think I liked this without enjoying it. I definitely had to hold its poetic pain and joy and delirium at arm’s length — don’t get too invested, don’t take these people’s assertions at face value, they do not always know who they were and what they're doing. Very nearly too intense for me.

There’s a brief view of some kids who haven’t known anything but the present world, and are building new visions of what it is to be a conscious being when communication and meaning have disintegrated; while I wanted more of that, I accept that our narrator Marlene was incapable of recognizing and evaluating their lives in the way I craved.

There's also one particular segment that I found superbly thrilling and creepy, and is sticking with me harder than the rest of the book: when Peacock is telling the story of the time he killed himself. Someone pulled the trigger; someone walked away; a mind within a body is present here today — any deeper chain of causation or stain of identity has been washed away in the noise.