Yes, true, it might be Joey’s next favourite comic book. Takes a bicycle right to the end of the world, or nearly so. You have to take your time to find the book, maybe in some deserted bookshop in Amsterdam or London. I’m surely not an expert of this genre, but there were some comics that really blew me away. And I keep coming back to them. One thing I love is the fragmentation of time in a comic book. When a painter knows how to slow down time.
Such fragmentation allows us to freeze and meditate on fleeting events, deepening our appreciation of the ephemeral. British landscape printmaker Jon McNaught brings the colour-mixing of traditional lithographs to the medium, refining its borderless panel down to its sparsest elements and painstakingly drawing and separating by hand each layer of colour, typically black, grey, pale blue and sunset pink.
Is there something like „sunset pink“ – I do think so! In „Pebble Island“ the Englishman recaptures his wanderings as a boy on an island in the Falklands after the 1982 war, taking time to show the rain subsiding before he sets of cycling across the beach through shafts of sunlight. A sheep looks up and briefly watches him past. Beautiful. Not much happening. Robert Wyatt’s record „Dondestan“ from 1991 could be an ideal companion to this silent book: both share a sense for far away places and slow motion.