Sea-man Lamprey: a tale told in five maritime vignettes by Mollie Goldstrom. 2005. 24p., black and white with two color covers.
One of my fiancee’s finds from the MOCCA fest was this small mini-comic by a young woman named Mollie Goldstrom. She had a few nice-looking “sea story” mini-comics and a really nice looking artist book.
This mini-comic has a brown cover with two colors: what looks like a rope motif in white in the background and a dark blue with the title (in banners) and two images, one of a sailor looking through a spyglass and the other of the head of a whale. It is clearly handprinted (the only thing I can find about the artist online is that she won a printmaking award at an arts festival), a lithograph I think (maybe silkscreen).
The inside is in black and white, and looks to be a computer print-out (if you look real close there are light lines that are kind of pixellated) but has very nice rich spot blacks.
The story (in five vignettes) concerns Captain Erasmus P. Lamprey through a few short adventures. The vignettes are not linearly organized, but do all relate together. There is an absurdity to the stories that is funny (beginning with the idea that Erasmus starts out his sea journey riding on a whale).
The art is a bit crude (and one can still see traces of pencils lines unerased (or more likely a product of adjusting levels on scans (I’ve had trouble with this in the past))) but not bad, more that there is clear potential for better. Page layouts are diverse and interesting, with the title page to each vignette having a nice decorative touch.
I’ll keep me eye out for more from Goldstrom. The artist’s book she had at MOCCA looked really interesting but was price prohibitive (it was all hand printed and bound).
I’d link to someplace to get it, but I don’t know where. You could try emailing the author (according to the back of the book) at inkfr0g AT hotmail DOT com (that’s a zero in the email).