Bore (2023) by Jason Bradshaw
This handsome book collects stories done over almost a decade.
It starts off with a showstopper of a story, really — it seems fully realised and speaks clearly (if silently).
It’s done over a long period by a young artist, so there’s, of course, quite a lot of exploration in how to do comics. So a few of the stories look like Kevin Huizenga…
… while other don’t at all. But even if there’s all this variety in the artwork, it feels like a very… edited? book. I’m guessing there were lighter pieces that could have been included, but it’s all depression all the time here.
The first half of the book is more externally oriented — we get traditional autobio anecdote based stories.
But then we seem to withdraw quite a bit, and large stretches of the book are very short pieces that all deal with heavy depression and suicide thoughts. Huh, I didn’t snap any examples of that, really — odd. Too late now!
There’s experimentation throughout, and I loved this one.
The book ends with a couple longer stories that sort of deal with the external world more again, so the book has a structure that’s like descending into hell and then a ambiguously hopeful ending. It’s a strong book, but it’s… it’s a lot.
The book can be bought from Black Eye.
I’m unable to find any reviews of this book, but here’s one of #11:
The 11th issue of Bore is a cleanly drawn, autobiographical comic that succeeds by omission. By that I mean the drawings are spare on detail in such a way that facial features, limbs, and pets contain as little elaboration as possible.
This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.