MARK LALIBERTE REVIEWS ‘THE EYE COLLECTOR’ ISSUE 1 …

I am currently enjoying the debut issue of Jonathan Ball’s The Eye Collector — a collaboration with artist GMB Chomichuk and letterer Lyndon Radchenka, the first of a 12-issue, full-colour monthly horror series just released by Image Comics.

This is a breezy read mashing up astronauts, entities and hallucinatory visions — delivered in a style that’s abstract enough that it’s worth going over the 20 pages of content a few times to try to decipher the puzzle of the narrative and catch hints about where things might be headed. Early in the issue, the captions offer the following Lovecraftian cosmic quip: “We set our sights for the stars / but then the stars / sighted us” … lines of pure poetry to set the stage. Ball has mentioned that the work is “loosely based on an old short story by ETA Hoffmann, ‘Der Sandmann’ (1816). This is the story that inspired Sigmund Freud to develop his concept of ‘The Uncanny’.”

The Eye Collector is an interesting, exploratory work; not a conventional comic at all, shying away from the strict panel-to-panel page grid in favour of a flow that’s a bit more collage-influenced. Chomichuk’s art style is a patchwork of textures and effects, visually unified by an aqua/emerald/grey colour palette, and I sense that this guy has spent some time playing around with old school, coin-operated photocopy machines. He revels in halftone dots, moiré patterns and the gritty, high contrast, 10th generation look of punk flyers. I also see a lot of late 80s/Stray Toasters-era Bill Sienkiewicz experimentalism in the mix, alongside breakdowns reminiscent of more contemporary creators, like fellow Canadian Jesse Jacobs, who also frequently dedicates whole pages to presenting sequences of wild, transformative facial iterations that seem to exist a bit outside the main flow of the book, such as the one that occurs on page 11 of the issue.

I don’t normally buy single issue pamphlet comics these days, preferring to read graphic novels in their final, collected form — and Jonathan told me in a message that Image has plans to put the entire 12-issue run into an Omnibus edition in about a year’s time — but I scooped this one up straight away because I was very curious what an author who I primarily know as a poet (though he’s written fiction, non-fiction and screenplays as well) might do with the comics form.

For me, it’s always compelling to find out that one of my Can-Lit peers also has an interest in the medium of comics — though in this case I should have guessed it, as Ball was one of the few writers in Canada to review my own comics-meets-poetry collection, BRICKBRICKBRICK, when in came out with Book*hug Press way back in 2010 — and that is a rare enough occurrence that I really wanted to get a taste of this NOW (and, for those of you who don’t frequent comic shops, places like Windsor’s Paper Heroes, for example, where I picked this up, it’s always good to support a first issue so the owner keeps getting future issues in. Unlike regular bookstores, which if I’m being cynical are sort of fancy consignment shops, the comic book market doesn’t do returns … stores order AND purchase their stock, so they need to see that there’s interest in a product for them to keep getting a book in. On the bright side of that equation, creators and publishers in the comics field get paid a lot quicker for the fruits of their labour than novelists ever do.) Obviously Ball is someone who has paid attention to that tiny space where fiction, poetry and the comics form might overlap, joining a handful of Canadian literary creators (like bpNichol, Gary Barwin, Michael e. Casteels, William Davison, and, yes, myself) who are open to interrogating the building blocks of comics and reinserting them into a new kind of literary terrain built upon cartoon-concrete foundations. Here, with The Eye Collector, Ball & co. are indirectly targeting that hybridized landscape, demarcating it as the ideal, most exquisite place to erect their story upon. With that in mind, I ultimately found that this first issue offers its reader a small but intriguing glimpse at the project’s fuller potential — eye for one can’t wait to see more.

P.s. As an aside, Ball’s podcast ‘Writing the Wrong Way’ is one of many lit-casts that I tune into on a semi-regular basis (this week he interviewed David Ly about his debut novel, Not All Dragons) and it’s been interesting to note that since joining the Image family he’s obviously gained access to people within the comics world, who have started appearing as interview subjects intermixed with the usual cross-section of literary luminaries — look for the Jun 30 conversation with Marvel and DC legend, Steve Orlando, for example. Long live the hybrid zone!