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blackbird27's review against another edition
4.0
Roman Muradov's postmodern Modernist comics have been one of the few entirely new pleasures I've encountered in artcomics over the past few years: his combination of highbrow midcentury illustration, Cubist-era abstraction, and Joycean language play are so exactly the kinds of comics I'd want to make if I had a tenth of his graphic brio, that I can't help feeling a little unsettled by them, as if I'd come across a notebook where a stranger had been making sketches from my dreams.
2016's Jacob Bladders is an advance on 2014's In a Sense, in that the black-and-white artwork is even more lusciously austere and the relentless punning is given more of a narrative drive. The story is still nothing much: an illustrator has his work stolen from him in a déco-noir alternate 1947, and people argue as endlessly and irrelevantly as on Twitter -- which Muradov underscores by constantly referencing an early version of the social-media service that works more or less like a stock ticker. Intentionally elliptical (William Blake is the other major reference figure) and satirical, it remains a slight work, but deeply satisfying anyway.
(It's perhaps worth noting for the record that I've owned this book for nearly a year, but until I started digging a pile of comics I'd bought and neglected to get around to reading I had forgotten purchasing it, to the extent that I've had it on an Amazon wishlist for months. Which is why I'm going to try to catch up on some of that reading this winter.)
2016's Jacob Bladders is an advance on 2014's In a Sense, in that the black-and-white artwork is even more lusciously austere and the relentless punning is given more of a narrative drive. The story is still nothing much: an illustrator has his work stolen from him in a déco-noir alternate 1947, and people argue as endlessly and irrelevantly as on Twitter -- which Muradov underscores by constantly referencing an early version of the social-media service that works more or less like a stock ticker. Intentionally elliptical (William Blake is the other major reference figure) and satirical, it remains a slight work, but deeply satisfying anyway.
(It's perhaps worth noting for the record that I've owned this book for nearly a year, but until I started digging a pile of comics I'd bought and neglected to get around to reading I had forgotten purchasing it, to the extent that I've had it on an Amazon wishlist for months. Which is why I'm going to try to catch up on some of that reading this winter.)
madeee's review against another edition
This is probably brilliant, but even if it isn't the art is beautifully captivating. And the author profile really had me fooled, too!
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