Maku, Sakura – Dark Tomato #1

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Dark Tomato

I know the rules of the small press publishing world by now (more or less), and I know that it’s impossible to publish most of these comics in color. Still, this one is crying out for color, and stuffing this into a black and white world hurt it more than a little bit. Of course, for all I know this is how it was meant to be seen and I’m an idiot, but this story is more (for lack of a better or more accurate word) colorful than all this. Not to mention the fact that the text sometimes gets lost in the various shades of grays, but that’s a technical problem. This is the story of Prince Tamlin Tomato, a woman who runs a subway train. It deals with the people she sees and various aspects of her life, which seems like too simplistic of a way to put it, as there’s a lot going on in every page. There’s her rather one-sided chats with her grandmother about the various odd things that she sees, and of course the things in the dark that she can’t quite make out. This is one of those cases where I bail out in the middle of the review, as I honestly don’t know what to say about it. It’s an utterly unique tale, more of an illustrated poem than anything, but it also defies any sort of conventional analysis. Check through her art on her website to see if it appeals to you, and if the answer is anywhere near yes, then this is very much worth a look. Provided that you can see past the “what might have been” aspect of this potentially existing in full color, that is. $5