I’d like to try posting more about comics that I’ve read recently. Here are some thoughts on Simon Moreton’s Smoo #7, now available for you to order.
– The presentation – three comics, a letter and a map, held together with a belly band – is excellent. Just works really well. A very appealing package.
– I read this comic all the way through twice in one sitting. I’ve been meaning to return to it for a third read. I think Simon’s comics lend themselves to and reward rereading, a characteristic to which I am partial.
– I think the order in which the three comics are presented has a real effect on the work. The first comic is a wordless story about Simon’s return to the town where he grew up. On my first read, I wasn’t sure how well this comic worked for me; maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was a little hard to connect to it without some of the narrative context that the next two comics offer. On the second read, though, I got a lot more out of it, thinking about the way that some of the images in the comic connect with the stories in the other two comics.
– Simon manages, in other words, to very directly communicate to readers some of the nostalgia, longing, reliving of memories, etc. that he must have felt when visiting his hometown for, I believe, the first time in many years. This is the sort of thing that is difficult to do without being heavyhanded (as autobio comics often are), and Simon’s success in doing so is a direct function of the format/presentation of the work.
– The second comic was my favorite, although the third one might have had the best moments. Simon’s writing is appealingly direct and simple in a way that belies its depth.
– Simon is developing a kind of symbolic iconography with the simpler, more pared down style he has used for his last few comics. In one of the Smoo #7 stories, for instance, he draws abstract word balloons that recall both a similar technique from a few of the stories in Smoo #6 and, even more interestingly, the way the geese are drawn in Grand Gestures (can’t find the exact pages I’m thinking of online, sorry). The way he draws clouds/leaves/fields/roads, so that each suggests the other and it’s sometimes up to the reader to decide what they’re looking at, would be another example. I will be very interested to see how this aspect of his work develops going forward.