Madden-Connor, Jonas – Ochre Ellipse #2

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Ochre Ellipse #2

Is it wrong that I get the impression that Jonas is just toying with us?  After reading the first couple of issues of this series I get the impression that he has a ridiculously firm handle on the “rules” of making comics and is trying to nudge those rules in subtle but different directions.  This comic starts off with a young man who goes into a grocery store on a regular basis (but never actually buys anything) because he’s obsessed with the clerk.  He has her schedule figured out, but has never worked up the nerve to talk about her, preferring to imagine the things she could be doing instead.  Jonas then uses a concept that I first saw in a Concrete story but that’s still visually striking: the idea that a person leaves a trail, a collection of images of themselves in motion, wherever they’ve been.  This is the first half of the comic, the second is when things start to wander a bit.  We see our hero from the last issue (regular size, and he sure seems to be a stand-in for Jonas) entering the same grocery store and chatting with the clerk.  He winds up on a bus with our hero from the first half of this book, chatting about the story so far and moving on to a theory of evolution.  Not THE theory, but it’s too complicated to get into here.  Read Stephen Jay Gould, that’ll help it make sense.  This returns us to the clerk, who has to decide whether or not to find out some potentially troubling genetic information.  All this leads to a sweet and open-ended finale, which I won’t ruin here.  As a reader, I’m a big fan of endings where we don’t know exactly what happened next.  Well, generally speaking, anyway.  My reasoning is complicated and probably contradictory, which means that it must be right.  This was up for a couple of awards (and won one of them), and deservedly so.  $4

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Posted on April 24, 2010, in Reviews and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Madden-Connor, Jonas – Ochre Ellipse #2.

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