Strip For Me 22

By Douglas Noble
www.strip-for-me.com

I'm not really sure what to make of this collection of short comic pieces. Most of them are only a page long and don't really look like traditional comics. A page of four rows of four small, square images, with paragraphs of text with vague connections to the images above each row doesn't really fill my idea of a comic. What are they? I'm not too sure.

The images are kind of interesting, and I just finished reading a zine of visual poetry (review soon!), and I kind of ended up viewing this zine along the same lines. The text can certainly be seen as narrative poetry of a sort, as the brief snippets of text describe ideas or actions without really going into them in depth. The images are then there to help create a mood for the text to be read with. Hmmm.

But some of the stuff in here is more like actual comics! There's a four pager about someone with an illness that seems to raise more questions than it answers, a one pager about a wolfman, and an excerpt from what I assume is a longer piece. What most of these have in common is that they don't really seem to give the reader all of the information. There always seems to be more of the story that the author isn't telling us. However, I don't believe there is anything else to read, and the way the excerpt was run ended up annoying me more than drawing me in and making me want to go and find more.

I guess I view some of the stuff here as narrative experiments. I don't really think that they succeeded, but I guess it's better to try for something big and fail than to do something mediocre.