Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Kit Anderson’s Safer Places, from Avery Hill Publishing.
by Arpad Okay. Kit Anderson invites you to walk with the wizard. The journey is a chapter-book of dreams, eerie tales of magical realism and technological enchantment. Memories from after the apocalypse. Rebirth, like the farm torn down and nature reclaimed, like the flowered hillside rising up and walking away. The stories that come from Safer Places don’t feel particularly safe. More like haunted, reminded, desired, overcome. The blossom the wizard plants will bloom long, in the deep time, as is only natural. So let go.
Safer Places is the creation of a thoughtful, deliberate artist, working hard to achieve a specific vision of uncanniness and ineffability. Sometimes, she comes off like Ted Stearn, rustic melancholy, and sometimes like Inés Estrada or Julie Doucet, transformative reveries. Anderson’s explorations of form don’t exactly depart from tradition — they use familiar concepts to create new and novel approaches. Dream submersion inverts the black and white of the panels, set beyond consciousness. The lights go out as we follow the characters inside of themselves.
But then Anderson’s dream art breaks form, more resembling Buk Ulreich’s paintings of dream horses than the style in which the dreamer has been rendered. Mixed in with stars and dream-stuff, abstract splashes of white infer the shape of a pony against the endless cosmic night. Anderson is a cartoonist whose grip on the mechanics of visual storytelling allows for some marvelous moments. Panels become the poetic timing of the words cascading over an image described and defined by the full page. Travel through space and time is implied by the form and obscured by the content. It’s delightful.
Some chapters are more fragments than stories. Dream logic with no interest in resolution. And then some of it does tell a story, or two stories at once, juxtaposing an exotic narration over a mundane narrative. The everyday rituals that maintain our lives become second nature, and a higher consciousness flows through you. Impressions. Sensations. The hole in the wall leads to stairs that aren’t really there, down in the basement of memory, where the cat can talk.
Dreams domestic, with one foot in the suburbs and one foot in the country, a potent concoction when the finality of nature must be reconciled with the longevity of plastic. Instead of folk horror, the magical realism turns the everyday into gothic fantasy. Look, if it’s got a talking cat giving you advice on your journey, I’m probably going to enjoy it. I just love the ease with which Anderson can shift tone and direction without disturbing the mood.
Speaking of, Safer Places honors the guide. Cat. Fox. Accepting that nature’s cycle means even when you’re led out of the wilderness, you will need to be led out of it again. (See also: The Paradox of Getting Better by Raven Lyn Clemens.) There are no safer places, no quest’s end. Thus, the importance of the guide. We need them to lead us through it.
The ideas grow denser the deeper you get. Themes repeat in different stories, in different ways, like the work of a composer. In this comics symphony, the part is played by the reeds, played again differently by the strings, and again reimagined by the brass. Like Zuo Ma’s Night Bus. And, like Ma and like a composer, there’s a feeling that the stories are in conversation with each other. One long piece on where we invest our energy changes the screensaver-alt-escape-art experiment that preceded it. The topic they share is agency, set against the ghosts of familiarity, bound to change. So let go.
Safer Places is available now. For ordering information, click this.
Avery Hill Publishing / $19.99 / £14.99
Written and illustrated by Kit Anderson.
Check out this 2-page preview of Safer Spaces, courtesy of Avery Hill Publishing:
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