Win Tane's Bra

Posted: Tuesday, March 20, 2007
By: Steve Saville

Cover of Win Tane's Bra Creator(s): Clayton Noone and Stefan Neville
Publishers: Oats Comics
From: New Zealand
Price:

Odd title eh, but be warned if the title seems a little strange that is nothing in comparison to this Kiwi comic’s contents. I have never had a bad’ trip’ but if I had I imagine it would be quite a bit like reading this comic. Now of course I don’t have to take a bad trip because I know exactly what it would be like, so thanks guys.

This is a seedy comic, the characters all appear and act spaced out and seem to be on the verge of vomiting passing out or just simply dying. They all have a zombie cum corpse like appearance about them.

The art work itself ifs a kind of contemporary version of a 60’s underground comic style. It all has a hallucinogenic feel about it. This feeling is heightened by the page layout. The pages don’t consist of the traditional frame as such but you follow a path through them as the characters wander through and around the public gardens in which the story is set.

This journey is often meandering often random and always unexpected. Everything about this comic just fails to hang on to a recognizable reality. As one of the characters says, “theres wierdos all thru this part,” oh yeah.

Now that might make the comic sound like a bit of a drugged out mess. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is grimy, it is seedy but each and every page is a beautifully created artistic whole. Not beautiful as in nice to look at quite the opposite the world presented is very similar to the visions of hell created by Bosch and it is that comparison that I feel makes the most sense when attempting to come to terms with how this comic operates. It is a grotesque look at an urban existence that most of us would prefer to ignore.

Ironically one of the visual highpoints in what is a very visual comic are the words. The variation in font size and the space given to the speech bubbles is a visually arresting aspect of this comic.

This comic is peopled by stoners, boozers and losers but it is never offensive. It comes close to bad taste it comes close to being incomprehensible [especially in the dream sequence] but always manages to pull back from the brink. Surprisingly the most disturbing feature in ‘Win Tanes Bra’ is the spider that seems to live on the detectives head, for some reason that just made my skin crawl.

Very original.

In a Word: Boschean.



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