M.R. NENO PRODUCTIONS
CARTOONIST: Michael Neno
48pp, B&W, $4.95
The Signifiers is a new comic book series from self-publisher, cartoonist, letterer, and comic book creator, Michael Neno. The Signifiers #1 takes me back to the ancient days of my first encounters with comic books.
One of the first things that captured my imagination about comic books was that the pictures they held within their flimsy covers were strange and were full of weird looking things. What has kept me reading comic books for pretty much every year of my life since I was seven (except for about three or four years) is that they are fun to read – even when I don’t completely understand what they are trying to tell me or sell me.
The Signifiers #1 embodies that. Even after two readings, I don’t quite understand it all, but I want more. This old-school, black and white comic book is set in a whacked out universe. The focus is a character named Splash, a Summer of Love-type black youth who must either obey or fight a mysterious force called The Voyst. In another story, Establishment gadfly/advocate, Landlark, the Heat-Seeking Dwarf, must escape his captors, the Polution Pioneers. What awaits him if he gains his freedom is even stranger.
If Jack Kirby and Paul Pope had gotten drunk together and produced a comic book, The Signifiers would be it. Of course, what would also be needed was Stan Lee trippin’ on something so that he could add his obtuse, sometimes fumbling dialogue. In another way, The Signifiers also seem like something that David Lynch and J.J. Abrams would have cooked up with Jack Kirby in mind.
Beyond Kirby, I can’t say for sure who or what influenced The Signifiers, but it has a free spirit and a willingness to go on a journey into the imagination without the weight of other comic books’ expectations and rules. Reading The Signifiers #1 reminded me of the first time I read Love & Rockets (either #8 or #9 of the first volume) in that, like early L&R, The Signifiers has a look that is old, but also new in a strange and exotic way.
This first issue also offers two backups. One of them features Landlark, the Heat-Seeking Dwarf. It is a lovely mixture of Jack Kirby’s New Gods with a funky take on counterculture. The story is strange, but Neno builds that story with thoughtfully drawn graphics and compositions. It is beautiful art. I could see every page of it in a gallery show.
Copies of The Signifiers can be ordered by sending a check or money order for $7.20 ppd. ($7.53 for Ohio residents), $4.95 for each additional copy, to M.R. Neno Productions, P.O. Box 151303, Columbus, Ohio 43215.
Copies can also be ordered via PayPal: http://www.nenoworld.com/The_Signifiers_No.1.html
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