Phase 7 #4: “Graffiti” by Alec Longstreth. 2003. 44p, b+w, $3.00.
Phase 7 #5: “Basewood: Chapter One” by Alec Longstreth. 2004. 28p, b+w, $2.00.
Both available from the author.
Alex Longstreth’s Phase 7 won the Outstanding Mini-Comics Ignatz award at Small Press Expo this year, so I ordered his two most recent issues.
Issue 4 is a single semi-autobiographical story about graffiti. The character Eddy (Campbell, a nod to the comics’ artist?) is subletting an apartment for the summer while he works on stage production at the University of Washington. He becomes interested in the graffiti he sees on his walk to work, first just sketching it and then buying some spraypaint and making his own. There are no simple answers in the story, but the ending gives it the fell of a morality tale.
Issue 5 is the first part (of five) in a longer story called “Basewood”. So far, the protagonist wakes up in the woods, bleeding from the head, missing a shoe (Samuel Delany would love that), and with no idea who he is or how he get there. He meets a dog, a monster, and an old man. It’s all feeling too clichéd for me: amnesia, an grizzled old man/guide, an unspoken mystery, a dragon-like monster. It’s still early on though, so maybe Alec will do something interesting with it. I had the same feeling about Happy Town and its been advancing away (for the most part) from its mish-mash derivative beginnings.
There’s an old idea of the comic strip as characters on a stage, that is, the characters act in front of a background. Alec’s art reminds me of that concept. His backgrounds have a very flat, stage-set appearance, even when he uses perspective to try to create depth (interestingly, in issue 4, Eddy works on a forced perspective stage-set that has the same look as some of the scenes he walks through). I think it’s partially due to the lack of shading (almost none at all) and partially due to the angle we see the backgrounds from (usually straight on), both of which contribute to a lack of depth, even though the settings themselves are rather detailed. In issue 5 there is a greater sense of depth in the forest scenes as Alec puts progressively darker shaded trees behind the characters.
Even without shading a bit of line variation would help with depth and in anchoring the characters and objects to the ground. When shading and color are eschewed, line weight takes on a greater importance.
While Issue 4 is almost completely 6 panel pages, Alec’s layouts and pacing show a greater sophistication in Issue 5. He uses the rhetorical style, varying size as necessary for the uses of the narrative.
Critiques aside, I did enjoy these mini-comics and will be reading future issues.
Tags: Comics, minicomics
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