- 1/8
Seven Stories 2
March 2018
- 56 pages
- 16.5 x 24 cm
- digital printing
- saddle stitched
- limited edition of 300 copies
£7.00
SEVEN STORIES is a biannual comics anthology edited by João Sobral and published by O Panda Gordo. Its purpose is to contribute to the dissemination of contemporary practices of comics by showcasing exciting new work by a diverse range of international artists.
SEVEN STORIES 2 features cover artwork by Elliot Snowman and comics by Bruno Borges, Lasse Wandschneider, Nick Norman, Émilie Gleason, Giada Ganassin, Marie Weber, and Mike S Redmond & Faye Coral Johnson.
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This is an incredible line-up which we are very pleased to present. On the editorial for this issue, João Sobral reveals more about his intentions and motivations. Here's an excerpt:
These new drawings I found online were usually composed of several drawings on the same page and they had text around them sometimes. It took me a while though to realise I was getting into comics because they didn't look like any of the comics I knew and had no interest in. Actually, they didn't look like anything I had ever seen before. I was amazed in a way that was difficult for me to fully understand but I just wanted to copy them. I wanted to look at my drawings and feel the same weird feeling I experienced when I looked at the ones I had found. They were kind of unattractive but also compelling in a mysterious way – they seemed to have some kind of life inside them.
Nowadays it's easier for me to rationalise this seemingly magical fascination. And with this second issue of Seven Stories, I'm trying to make a point about it – I'm interested in the accidental nature of drawing. I believe the accidents and mistakes resulting from the act of drawing were the mysterious thing that was giving life to those new drawings. And the most fascinating thing about it was that they were not trying to cover up their accidents or correct their mistakes, they were embodying and pursuing them. The effect this had on me was the sensation that exciting whole new worlds were being created in front of my eyes. And in those worlds, new kinds of life were possible.
(...) This second issue of Seven Stories is exactly about that – I selected and invited artists whose work remind me of what got me into drawing and into comics in the first place. But during this process I was always guided by a somewhat abstract and speculative feeling and not by a strong or concrete conviction. This editorial, which was the very last thing produced for this publication, is my attempt to process, understand, and explain that feeling. And even if it doesn't make any sense to you, I hope you can look at these Seven Stories and somehow get a sense that they belong together in these pages.
- What binds all the disparate stories in this book together is that Sobral has curated a collection where the experimental can be celebrated; where we can acknowledge that comics is a medium in which work that is superficially less refined in presentation can be just as effective in its communicative power than the most intricately rendered strips. That’s evident throughout this issue whether in the busy cartooning elasticity of Émilie Gleason’s tale of a failed deity in hiding (‘Human Vs. God’ above); the minimal visuals of Giada Ganassin’s solitary soliloquy (‘Human Vs. Society’ below); the stifled isolationism of Marie Weber’s strip about a group trapped within an apartment during a hurricane wherein every panel feels like an encroaching prison cell (‘Human Caught in the Middle’); and the surreally structured interlinked narrative divergences and contrasts of Mike S. Redmond and Faye Coral Johnson’s ‘Green Dolphin Street’ (‘Woman and Man’).
- Andy Oliver (Broken Frontier)