So, I was checking out Brandon Graham's blog at the end of last week and he mentioned a bunch of releases by the London based comic collective DECADENCE. He praised their 'Moebius/Otomo' vibe and included a few pictures of the latest publication, Pyramid Scheme by Lando.
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| it just screamed 'BUY ME', I swear... |
The words in combination 'Moebius/Otomo' had me drooling like Palov's Dog so I went to their site and bought it. Whilst I was there I picked a couple of other mini-comics by the splendidly named Stathis Tsemberlidis which also exhibited similar Moebiusisms.
The comics arrived and the first thing that struck me was the paper stock. The beautiful, off white, fibrous paper lent a real organic and tactile quality to the work. The simple, almost uniform design of the covers (primarily Neptune's Fungi and Adamao) was also immediately striking.
Neptune's Fungi involves a one man submersible descending into to the sea and discovering some mind-bending, hallucinatory transformation occurring in the salty depths. It a horror comic at its core I think, visceral without resorting to splashes and swathes of red. In fact the only colour that is used here is black, there is minimal shading and masses and masses of tiny wrinkled, detailed lines. Its mesmerising stuff that borders on the grotesque. There is a Lovecraftian eeriness to Neptune's Fungi that I've rarely seen done this well. It's so understated and meditative.
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| FINISH HIM!! ...sorry |
Adamao is a much more psychedelic beast. Psychedelia via the grisly body-horror of David Cronenberg, mind you. It starts with five floating brains, moves to a brutal fight by a bunch of what I guess technically must homunculus of some sort and ends with the victor flying to assume the throne in some sort of pantheon of animal headed gods. It really feels like reading a hypercondensed, visceral version of Jodorowsky's The Incal. The lines on the floating, sorta gem thing are pure Moebius. I know I keep making this comparison but Tsemberidis' pencils and awareness of scale is so god damn good there really isn't any other comparison to make....it's that good.
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| breathtaking stuff... |
Pyramid Scheme is a collection of four short strips by Lando. Where as Neptune's Fungi and Adamao have a kinda bacterial body horror vibe the stories in Pyramid Scheme are of a more dystopian world/post-apocalypic stripe. 'Last Drink' in particular with its tale of a man and what would appear to be the last, delicious bit of water on the planet.
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| mmmmm delicious shading... |
Lando works with a sparser line than Tsemberlidis, you can see it in the delicate swoop of the clouds and dust in the picture above. Where Tsemberlidis uses lots of closely grouped wiggly lines to show texture and mass Lando uses a really simple but beautifully executed grey and black dot shading technique that really does evoke a heavy Otomo vibe, especially above.
The final story in the book is Pyramid Scheme itself, a trippy tale of life for three people on some sort of Greek-M C Escher-floating paradox. Things melt and turn into crystal and fall to the earth. It's spellbinding stuff it really is, you can feel the sharpness of the crystalline fragments floating around and the thick tar-like white liquid that floods everything.
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| this is upside down....sorry, i suck at the internet, ok?! |
Alll three of the comics mentioned above are available at decadencecomics.com and do not cost very much at all. It's great to read something from our own shores that is independently made and of exceedingly high quality, surely it's worth a shot? or would you rather read Green Lantern all day long?
