I enjoyed reading Aaron Cockle’s thoughts on my comic. I’m not familiar with the book he cites so I’m now very curious to read it.
Black Pillars 1, Andrew White
I liked the book that White did for Retrofit earlier this year, We Will Remain, I thought it was structured well as short stories, and they each had a density and inter-relatedness that became more evident with subsequent readings. It was also a very assured work, and left me looking forward to what he would do next.His new book, Black Pillars, part one of a two-part story, deals with mysterious entities that emerge from the ground, in the shape of enormous black pillars. There are hints that these may be a sort of natural (not alien or ‘supernatural’) phenomena, but it’s unclear what the pillars are. There is a good deal of ambiguity in the work, and the story jumps around in time and shifting points of view of individuals affected by the pillars. White uses alternating grid/panel variations, 3 panel landscapes, 6-panels, 8-panels, 9-panels, as well as different materials (pen, brush, wash, gray tone), to depict all of this.
The closest thing I’ve seen like it in fiction is Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s book, Roadside Picnic, which deals with a similar sort of catastrophic event from a personal, on-the-ground perspective. Stanislaw Lem, in his essay About the Strutgatsky’s Roadside Picnic, talks about the impact such events can have on society: ‘The greater the historic event, the more pronounced was the distance between the great and the insignificant, the sublimity and the wretchedness of human fates. Glorious battles at sea that once decided the destiny of empires possessed at a distance the beauty of a painting of a battle, and close up a repulsive gruesomeness.’
We are the pillars? The pillars are us? Or it’s something else altogether. I’m looking forward to reading the second part.Image above from Black Pillars 1, Andrew White