Nothing Fits by Mary Tamblyn and Alex McCrone

My initial introduction to Nothing Fits came in the form of a particularly unimpressive Kickstarter video. Despite a well edited introduction montage and great atmospheric music, Mary Tamblyn and Alex McCrone were more dead than deadpan and mumbled their way through a script asking me for my hard earned cash. 'Put some effort in' I thought and half-heartedly clicked through to their online strips for a perfunctory glance.

Five minutes later I was back and pledged my financial support.



The comic that I had read was instantly appealing not to mention engaging, funny and smart. Underlying the strip's many virtues was an impressively snotty attitude. There was something brashly confident about the drawing and writing.



The opening pages introduced the scenario, characters and circumstance with admirable economy. There was nothing on those pages that did not need to be there; words and pictures complimented one another perfectly. This is perhaps reflective of Mary Tamblyn's (writer of Nothing Fits) background as an artist, born with the confidence that a picture can tell a thousand words but it must also be the result of a close creative relationship between writer and artist. Each seeking to support, rather than eclipse, the other.



If Nothing Fits reminds me of anything it is books from my 70s childhood, specifically the work of Joan Aiken, Diana Wynne Jones and Margaret Mahy, (the Godmother, the Materfamilias, of New Zealand fiction). On hand was the same feeling of mad, offhand invention, of imaginations that could be opened on a whim to gush dreams and drama. Hover cars, mummies, mad science labs, wizards, Egyptian gods, castles, snotty girlfriends, giant snakes, ghosts, strange rat people, formal gardens, foreboding forests, clones, magic portals and gods are all crammed together under one cover - but nothing feels out of place or forced.

Nothing Fits also shares with those grand dowagers an underlying tone which hints at the tragedy and disappointment of life. This nuisance is present throughout the whole comic, right up to the final illustration of the finished book, which provides an unexpected emotional punch to the gut as you saunter through the exit-simultaneously upending your readers perspective on the story you just finished.



The Wynne Jones/Mahy 70s connotations are reinforced by the art. Alex McCrone's scratchy pen and ink style brings to mind Pat Marriott and Quentin Blake, (with perhaps a touch of Tove Jansson). Giants of childrens illustration. What's strange about that is that I hated those guys when I was a kid (not Jansson!) and I love Alex's art. The pictures and storytelling in Nothing Fits have an effortless feel, as if it all just flows out from pen to page. I doubt this is true. What's on the page is probably the result of blood, sweat and tears. The product of a lifetime spent drawing.

Whatever. Alex McCrone's drawing chops are impressive.



Nothing Fits is a great collaboration between two equal, complimentary creators. The easy synthesis is reflected in the components that make up the whole. Monochrome colours wash over the inks in lovely gouache hues. From what I can tell they are painted, high-wire style, directly onto the page. That's pretty audacious. Look Ma, no hands! Makes me nervous just thinking about it. Equally as impressive, in an unassuming way, is the lettering. The font, created from the artists handwriting (I think), lends the dialogue an energy, underlying the scripts sass. No small accomplishment.



Nothing Fits started life as a web-comic. While you could quite happily experience it just on the page I'd recommend checking out the site where it all began. Along with the comments section banter there are some lovely Easter-eggs to be found in the attached process blog. Sketches, notes, additional mini-strips, fan art and asides give extra life to the main comic. It's from these features, viewed together and at a distance of a couple of years, that you feel the fission a web-comic like Nothing Fits can generate. There is the sense of things fermenting, of a community coming to life around a smart, beautiful strip devised by two young students from the arse end of the world. It's a heartening glimpse of the way the world is now, and the things that you can achieve with some pretty basic resources and a big imagination.

Nothing Fits can be brought here and read here.

Kelly Sheehan
Faction Comics + Earth's End

Western Park by Timothy Kidd

The Great New Zealand Comic is currently a work in progress.

The comic in question is being constructed 24/7 in the head of creator Timothy Kidd. It is a hydra headed beast, consisting of numerous strips which overlap and interlink. Events revolve around the members of the Rabbit family and their friends and acquaintances; a grand narrative taking place against a backdrop of inner city Auckland and its satellite suburbs.

Some of the mesh of stories can be found over at the blogspot, Western Park. Served up in bite sized portions are a variety of stories, including; Bernard on the Eve, Blues Clues, Farfiva, Be my Ghost(1) and assorted diary comics and ‘test patterns’. Parts have turned up in small press anthologies such as Radio as Paper and Dailies. One section can be found in Adrian Kinaird's From Earth’s End: The Best New Zealand Comics, along with a profile of Tim and a (fascinating) short rundown of his working methods. Another was featured in cancelled fashion/style mag Pavement.

The tone of the strips is deadpan, nuanced with acid observation of the numerous characters foibles. Collected it would be equal parts sitcom, epic 19th century social novel and slapstick tragedy, desperate elements held together by exacting cartooning skills and an appreciation of narrative that runs from Dickens to Larry David to Jamie Hernandez.

The art is precise, gentle and keenly aware of the importance of detail and day to day observation. It's a style that has evolved over decades in numerous sketch books, and hundreds of pages of comics, a narrative in its own right, the antipodes equivalent of Crumb(2).

Part of a single page story that appeared in Pavement, (issue 62, summer 2003/2004) (3).

Came the dawn

Tim has been working on his comics for a long time.

Most of the forerunners to the current project(s) have been discarded or put on hiatus. The most developed of these, Came the dawn, emerged in a variety of mini-comic incarnations before being picked up by Karl Wills and released under his The ComicBook Factory imprint. Three parts were published, enough to give an appreciation of Came the dawn's level of ambition, enough to induce frustration that the series was suspended and now remains in limbo.

Came The Dawn covers 1-3.

Some sense of the scope can be gathered from the character gallery below. 20 characters, all sharply rendered fictions, none of them are on the page for long, yet each manages to make a unique impression and stick in your head.

Having read and re-read the three issues over the years I still pick up on subtleties and details which I have passed over up in previous readings. Came the dawn is happy to build at its own pace and you can keep up or fall away, it's up to you(4).

Half a world away

The first comic I read by Tim was Half a world away. I still have my copies acquired over the few years I worked at Mark One Comics in the mid-nineties. Seven A4 books, the paper now beginning to yellow and the staples to rust. You can see a couple of them below, in all their fallen glory.

Set in an unspecified town in rural New Zealand the characters are isolated by circumstance and disposition. Exchanges, when they take part, are tentative and unsure. The landscape stretches out around them, reducing people to an inconsequential component.

Under the alienation and loneliness is an undercurrent of threat that eventually erupts into violence, no less disturbing in that we witness the aftermath and not the explosion. More disturbing in that it follows a moment of tenderness and intimacy.

Half a world away was, and remains, an impressive comic (though will Tim squirm if you talk to him about the series).

I used to nag him about when the next issue was coming out. It was never fast enough (though always worth the wait). Which is pretty much how I have continued to feel to this day(5); expectant, but patient.

Because when you examine Tim's work, and realize the breadth of his subtlety and scope, there can be little question that when he does finally complete his Rabbit Family work, whatever it ends up being called, and whatever final form it takes, that it will be a New Zealand great.

So I can wait. 

Kelly Sheehan

Faction Comics + Earth's End

(1): The titles of these stories may change the next time they make it into publication.
(2) : My favourite section of these numerous volumes was where Tim began to copy vintage photos of the 40s and 50s. Suddenly his characters became more rumpled, disheveled. The slight awkwardness in the early work fell away and in place there was a confidence which has not stopped challenging itself since.
(3): Strictly speaking this strip is not from Western Park but it is from the general continuity so I've included it. Also it's a 'cross- over' story which features both members of the Rabbit family and Bernard who, in his own strip, currently remains trapped within the confines of his own room.
(4): Me? I'm still waiting for it start up again and lead me on a bit further.
(5): One thing about that: Any one of the works examined in this article was worked over by Tim to an astonishing degree, change upon change upon change. Just when you think it is finished there's something that needs to be added or subtracted or reworked. As an expectant reader this can get a little frustrating. And yet it's always worth it. Always. Those changes are done for a reason and you just better suck it up ,buddy because it's not change; its refinement!

Mesmo Delivery by Rafael Grampá

I think that if I was going to get a tattoo, I'd ask the artist of Mesmo Delivery, Rafael Grampá, to design it. This comic just oozed style, a style that screams "ginger haired hipster with beard, braces and black rimmed glasses, playing the saxophone ...and drinking an espresso".

Yeah; crazy, crazy hip.

The art was key to Mesmo Delivery truly delivering. It's somber enough to give the impression of darkness, grainy enough to give it grit and bold enough to... well, to tattoo into my skin.

Damn, boy, this sure is purty

To top it off, the entire piece felt filtered -drained of colour, but without being overly muted, which gave it a real noir trucker look.

The world of Mesmo Delivery was equally gritty and intense. I have seen enough hitchhiker movies to know that truck-stops, diners and roadside hangouts usually result in a beheading or zombie attack. And Mesmo Delivery did not disappoint on the violence dial. This comic is graphic.

The characters were the most beautifully-ugly band of dysfunctional misfits I've seen in a long while. First up is Rufo, an oversized lug, with a squashed, pug like face, and gigantic, baby-like quality. And our hero (if that's the word for it), Sangrecco? Grampa describes his creative evolution (in a generous gallery at the back of the book) as a blending of Elvis and Iggy Pop; a character who brings performance art to assassination. Which is true. This character, for all his ugliness, is like ballet dancer with blades. And the supporting  characters; a band of toothless bottom feeders, made me cringe as much as smile - with g-strings over jeans, overbites, overalls and over-the-top inbreeding up to the wazoo.

I think what I enjoyed most about it though was it's zany, self-aware, and lovingly crafted cinematic framing. There were some panels, some scenes which just left my mouth hanging open they were so frickin' cool! Point-of-view conversations, beheadings (where zoom-in close-ups show the minutiae of the blade tearing through a throat), impalings, and my favourite panel - where a moment of piss-your-pants terror has been executed with unimaginable (for the subject matter) design panache. It's something else.

The story itself (also authored by Grampá) was simple, following a couple of mysterious truckers pulling into a diner. I won't go into the details, but it worked perfectly with the intense graphical quality of the art. I suspect my Faction co-publisher would disagree with me, but not all storylines have to give you sucker-punch depth. In fact the simple story telling of Mesmo complemented the visual complexity of the comic's design -  and I found the balance pleasing.

It definitely makes me want to see more, but not in the sense that I fell in love with the characters, or wished the story would never end. In fact, in love with Mesmo Delivery I definately am not. There was certainly nothing to like in the characters, and the violence was harrowing. But as a spectacle, it was riveting. It was such an adrenaline-pounding read that, like a drug trip, I felt hollowed out after it was all over. And like a drug, it left me wanting more.

And a tattoo. It left me wanting a tattoo by Grampá. So yeah. Go buy this book.

Get it here
Preview it here

Amie Maxwell
Faction co-editor 

Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrorer

I always like to imagine the people I admire, be they authors, artists or scientists, as being friends of mine. Talent is just an attractive trait and if you've got it, I want to be friends with you. So, to my mind at least, Gfrörer is now one of my besties.

Her comic is aptly named "Black is the color" and it is beautiful. Beautiful in a way an H bomb is beautiful - - devastating - but also glorious and full of light. The brief bio at the back of her comic states that "her name rhymes with despair, and her heart is as black as jet". And wow; the comic. Let's just say, you wouldn't expect anything less from a jet black heart. The story is woven through with so many moments of intimacy and horror, that by the end of it I was left with a weird mix of sadness and hope meshed together. I wasn't exactly sure where one stopped and the other started. So yeah, Black is the colour" is a little bit of an emotional fucking rollercoaster, frankly.

The art was divine. The lines were so fine and detailed, and each line told a little more about the story, until you got to the end of them and just felt blasted and wrung out. It was so beautifully drawn, I had to stop and slow down from time to time to truly see how those lines made the wind move, the boats move and the sea move from panel to panel. The detail slows you down, but in a good way, and it richly deserves the time you spend on it.

I should mention that the book features mermaids. These creatures are anything but the ethereal beauties sometimes imagined, and they offer a light, teenage contrast to the flagging human, who serves as the center of this tale. The death in this book is shot through with immature prattle, which makes it light and a little sick and twisted at the same time.

In the end; did I get the full gist of this book's message? I think so, but more at an emotional level than an intellectual one. "Black is the colour" illustrates the horror and banality of our existence - and the beauty of our death; especially when there's someone loving there at the end to help take you away.

I hope I go like that. Thanks for the insight, Gfrörer, old pal.

Buy it here (seriously recommended)

Read it here (cheapskate!):

Amie Maxwell
Faction co-editor