Review: Nobrow 6

Nobrow 6 – various writers and artists

Nobrow Press, $24, ISBN: 978-1-907704-19-2

Never has there been a publisher with such a unified sense of aesthetics as Britain’s Nobrow Press.  Occupying a strange hinterland somewhere between screenprinting, the Sunday funny papers and sketchbook scribbles, their sensibility has sparked a home-grown comics scene, as well as attracting like-minded international artists.

Nobrow 6 is the latest installment of their anthology series.  This time around, the artists involved tackle the theme of the double.  This is an idea that has resonated throughout literary and mythological history, from Narcissus’ reflection, through the German doppelganger, to Gothic imposters and science fiction’s endless nightmares of parallel worlds.  Given how central the techniques of reproduction are to Nobrow’s artists, it’s a theme that seems ripe for fresh exploration through the comics medium.  In addition to a comics section, there is also a flipside to this anthology, offering 60 further pages of illustrations.  Again, these are mostly double-page spreads and offer some humourous, dark or outright abstract takes on the double theme. 

Art by Sam Kolchoz

On the comics side, Luke Pearson’s opening strip is also one of the highlights of the book, exploring the relationship between art and the reality that it depicts.  In it, an artist leads his unsuspecting date to see the sculpture he has been creating — a larger than life replica of himself. It’s a curious examination of the Nobrow aesthetic, inviting us to question what some of these abstract, cubist images would look like in a three-dimensional world.  The resulting horror is compounded by Pearson’s wicked sense of humour, as the artist lists the materials he used in the sculptures creation very quickly turns our stomachs.

Michael Deforge

This sense of the grotesque is common to many of the strips — each a double-page spread, naturally — such as Stephane Blanquet’s incredibly dark, surgical tale.  His characteristic body horror is rendered even more disturbing here, as he adopts the borderless cut-out style of other Nobrow artists.  The result is something not too far removed from German expressionism and early Soviet animation.  Disturbing, too, is Michael Deforge’s “Splitsville” story that looks at the narcissistic side of relationships and takes it to a surreal extreme, with a man in love with his female double.

There are, thankfully, some more innocent and fantastical explorations, too.  Joseph Lambert produces a classic strip here in-keeping with the ideas of his I Will Bite You! collection.  Reflections, shadows and mirror images all take on a physical presence as he meditates on childhood imagination, and the games we invent when we’re alone.  That same approach that emphasizes the corporeality of images is also evident in Kevin Huizenga’s strip (yes, there’s a Huizenga comic here, which says so much about the heights that Nobrow’s profile has reached in the past year).

Joseph Lambert

Some other stand-out strips include Jon McNaught’s contribution that takes advantage of comics’ artistic abstraction to play with the notion that, naturally, an artist’s characters will bear some similarity to one another.  The noir style with which he renders his tale makes this an altogether more sinister notion.  Herman Inclusus (the sinister alter-ego of Stuart Kolakovich) also keeps it creepy with his wonderfully anachronistic ghost story, which manages to squeeze a great deal of story and development into the short space allotted to him.

Herman Inclusus

The formal restriction of two pages per artist, while fitting for the book’s theme, is also often its downfall.  Many of the artists here work in broad strokes, or in a decompressed way that makes their strips feel unfinished or underdeveloped.  Irkus Zeberio’s brilliantly conceived “Fukushima” strip falls unnecessarily flat, and Malachi Ward’s piece feels more like a teaser for a larger work than a complete story.  It’s artists like Lambert and McNaught for whom small, compressed panels form part of their style that are able to flourish under these constraints.

There is much promise in many of the artists on display here, many of whom have yet to find a wider, international audience.  With the continued growth of the publisher and their ability to attract bigger names like the aforementioned Huizenga, Blanquet, and cover artist Tom Gauld, it would seem likely that we will see some vital new art emerge from this homegrown scene very soon.

— Gavin Lees

Posted in: Gavin Lees,Review