Well, not really finds, I guess. Here’s the deal: If you’ve ever been an exhibitor at SPX, you know that people will often just walk up to you and give you stuff. Some of this turns out to be good, some of it terrible, and a lot of it somewhere in the middle. Anyway, since most people reporting back from SPX (and, yes I know that SPX was like a month ago, but gimme a break–I’ve been working on a book) have been highlighting the stuff they bought, I thought I’d try to post a few quick write-ups over the next week or two of some of the more interesting stuff that wound up in my hands at this past show.
(First, though, a disclaimer: I received a number of things from people that I read while I was at SPX and then passed on to other people, and some stuff just gets lost in the shuffle… so if you gave me something at the show and it doesn’t wind up in my roundup, please don’t be personally offended.)
Nomad Station by Sara Rosenbaum
Mini-comic, 7 1/2″ x 5 1/2″, 28 pgs., B&W interior, Block (or maybe potato?) print cover
Nomad Station is apparently a fictional story adopted to comics form from the book The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World. The story, told in the first person, centers on two young men who, I assume, are residents of the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. The two are traveling to a dance held at Nomad Station, which seems to be maybe some sort of camp or small town, and they decide to stop on the way and visit a professor, a white westerner, living there, thinking that he might be able to supply them with an elixir/aphrodisiac that they call “Ada-men-ee.” The professor misunderstands what they’re after, which leads to a discussion about anthropological matters that the two young men would likely have just as soon been kept in the dark about–youth initiations, ritualized homosexuality, etc– particularly as they’re on their way to a try to make some time with the local women. It’s an interesting story, the thematic gist of which centers on things like the conflict between non-native perceptions (and mis-perceptions) of native peoples, and the conflicting pulls of modernity and tradition on those people.
Sara’s cartooning is quite graceful and fairly accomplished for someone wandering around giving out her books for free. She uses a lot of large areas of black and reminds me a bit of David B. in both this respect, as well as in her occasional incorporation of non-literal/diagramatic drawing, as here:
Her storytelling is clear and confident and even pulls off some interesting formal maneuvers, as in the flashback transition at the end of this page where the young “flashback version” of the professor seamlessly continues a line of dialog spoken in the previous panel by his present day counterpart:
Nomad Station is definitely work tracking down, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of her work around in anthologies and the like. From the looks of her website, she’s been doing comics for a while, and a Google search turned up a project she did with David Lasky. Anyway, Nomad Station is definitely worth tracking down.
Here website is: http://si.arrr.net
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