Like a light show in the darkness of a comics convention.
One of the wonderful things about attending a convention like SPX is the oppurtunity to meet other cartoonists operating just below the radar of the taste-makers, even within the 'art comics scene'. It's a real ground-level experience and a chance to meet fantastic people from all over the globe or even a neighbor you never knew you had.
Even better than meeting fantastic comics fans and cartooinsts is finding out that some of these people you might not otherwise hear about are making great, exciting comics.
Such is the case with Sakura Maku.
Cheebcheebshka (and I hope I'm spelling that right) is a 20-page, magazine-sized minicomic with a hyperdelic, kinetically colored, silkscreened cover. Slashes of color, like a kaliedescope smashed open by a sonic burst, dance above the heads of two heart-headed, cyclopean aliens. Even the name, Cheebcheebshka, sounds like like declaration of an alien scat, a jittery splash of vocal cymbals and hi-hats.
The story is a love note from a group of art and music students to Beety T, a homeless man living in the New York City subway tunnels, who they reintroduce to the open air, seducing him with music and friendship and reuniting him with his intergalactic family
A lot of the greyscale got muddied in the scanning and shrinking,
but I think the calm before the energy storm still reads.
Through the use of collage, a thin line capturing images before they fly out of the mind space, layered, emotional text and a stream-of-concious aproach to storytelling, Sakura captures the frenetic distortions of life. It's a city life, a college life, a life lived late at night, that jumps from apartment to bar to park to club. It's fast-paced and short on attention span. Reading this book is like hearing about a night where too much seemed to happen, told by a group of people who keep jumping into the main thread of the story to tell you what had been left out, to run-on on tangents of separate perspectives and experiences. A night filled with gossip, hair styling, run-ins with unexpected people, drinking, maybe some drugs and punctuated by moments when time just seemed to stand still as everyone's attention was drawn to the musical guru who makes sense of it all.
Words whisper and explode with banality and drama. They collide and run in long rivers like someone afraid to pause in case they lose your ear before they finish. Word balloons spill right out of characters mouths as though you have to read them before they vanish like so much smoke. Some words are written like quickly dashed off emails or text messages, as though the way we write now might be effecting the way we speak.
There are very few cartoonists out there using text as a
graphis element in their work, which is a shame, because it can work so well
when done right.
There's a vitallity when you're young, in the city in the summer. There's so much more to do, there's less responsibility and you can spend all night with close friends, meet amazing people and act like your own personal group of rock stars. There's always someone you meet who opens your eyes, who provides an emotional core and lends significance to what might otherwise be just a long string of carrousing. Beety T provides that for these characters. His addition to their group gives them a reason to be told about and his subtraction is the reason their brief time together has meaning.
It's a lovely story, a sentimental journey through the near science fiction that is 21st-century life. Nothing is forced in and no monkeywrench was employed to twist aliens and jazz together. These strange elements are there to help explain the magic of happenstance and the tragedy of loss. It's a way of describing what happens when you meet a fantastic person and get to see great, exciting art.
—Justin J. Fox