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Revolution babies

For Tripwire a review of Manuele Fior’s Celestia, a major work by an artist with a few of those already on the shelf.

Some of them contain bits of business that crop up again in Celestia, but Fior nudges his magic-realism mood into a slightly new niche in the process. Even less surprise in Celestia than usual to remember that Fior is an architect, since the comic’s built environment is all walls and floors and furniture, calmness conjured by blissful Adriatic sunlight in a version of Venice where they apparently did build Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masieri Memorial. Calm on the surface anyway: all art of change and struggle now arrives through the lens of Covid, but in an Italian context the citizens of Celestia beating a retreat from an unseen invader and barricading in a lagoon has many parallels to ponder. No one actually says that art might save the day, but the visuals work with Wright and Mark Rothko and Igor Stravinsky so it goes without saying.

You could ponder how the story’s politics decodes into something that isn’t necessarily very Left, although the message that the older generation needs to get out of the road so that the young can get on with it is barely revolutionary at this point.


Somewhere very different:

Authentic revolution in Zig Zag, the new chromatic cavalcade from Will Sweeney.

Reviewing Sweeney’s last art book Grok for The Comics Journal I said that urgency wasn’t really the artist’s thing, but this time the political message gallops in at a rapid clip.

Zig Zags 24 wordless pages are a fractal sequence of actions, any one of which can’t happen before its predecessor; a preset sequence of contingency plans that could have been laid last month or last millennium. Characters are called forth by other characters and emerge from within still other characters and then consult different characters and then merge into yet further larger ones, eventually coalescing into a large multi-part multi-pilot humanoid robot that tackles some armoured dictator in another plane of reality somewhere.

Exactly what’s what hardly matters, but the thrust of some revolutionary collective action is hard to miss, as is the circularity of the events. Another cycle of all this seems assured at some point, a semi-permanent revolution, even as the giant body of the previous dictator lays in another of Sweeney’s state funeral images. The original instigator appears to be an old soldier with medals, from whom smaller (younger?) activists emerge as he melts away. Having entered the dictator’s citadel, the unified collective converts soldiers to its cause with one blast of illumination from a gun; and in the end it’s an illuminated citizen, not one of the outside insurgents, who concludes things.

At one point a group of characters catch a double-decker bus out of whatever urban city they seem to be in so as to reach a more isolated location, and later the giant dictator holds an umbrella against the rain of yellow paralyzing jism that the good guys have called forth with a firework. So it’s not without a certain British character. On black glossy paper the colour work in Zig Zag surges with voltage but it’s an adult fable, an organised revolution against something visually coded as El Presidente carried out by small cogs in a larger collective who take public transport to get where they need to be.

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