Rare Creature #1

Posted: Tuesday, March 28, 2000
By: Darren

Creator(s): Kelly Seda
Publishers: Slave Labor Graphics
From: USA
Price: ?

This is a curious little comic. Kelly presents a variety of layouts that seem more like experiments in graphic design than useful story telling techniques. Dotted lines indicate a character's gaze, arrows and flowcharts direct your attention all over the page but it all just left me confused, a situation which wasn't helped by Slave Labor printing some of the pages out of order.

The occasion experiment works well; in a nice piece of storytelling one image without dialogue is used by Kelly to tell us all we need to know about the relationship that resulted in Amelia's present situation.

I managed to figure out that the central character, Amelia Mire, has just moved into an an apartment in Manhattan. She is pregnant, suffering from bouts of morning sickness and dizzy spells. She carries her diary around with her all the time, but in her present condition keeps dropping it and then gets angry with the people who try to help by picking it up for her.

There is lot going on in this book, but Kelly is trying to hard to be inventive and ends up just getting in the way of the story.

In a Word: Experiment.



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