Word: herpich
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...Cusp" (Alternative Comics; 40 pp.; $3.95) debuts the work of the fawn-like 22-year-old Thomas Herpich. The cover even has a deer with its head sticking out of leaf-covered lake. A naturalist theme continues inside with stories involving fish, werewolves, ants and people, all of whom either want to eat each other or mate or both. All of Herpich's stories have a dream-like quality - full of strange narrative logic founded in base instincts and anxieties - yet always funny...
...Look?" We see the leaf. Cranbury, like us, remains mutely dumbfounded. That's it. Stare all you like you won't get it. Basically it's a shaggy dog story, but it doubles as a portrait of frustration. There's a kind of poetry too in the way Herpich uses silent panels to pace out the story. He may even be touching on a repeated motif with the "leaf" of paper at the beginning and the leaf...
...What's particularly clever about "Eros" is the way Herpich uses the forms contained in a panel to mimic those of its predecessor. A fallen ice-cream cone transposes into an eye and a nose; the fluttering wings of a bug cut to a matching close-up of the ears of the jackass. These visual puns are the equivalent of clever poetic wordplay, but unique to comix. Herpich, who's pen and ink drawings are otherwise fairly simple, has a gift for the infinitely variable patterns of comix. Through repetition and pauses, panels that repeat something from before or else...
...Cusp" is a book you can read several times over with ever-increasing pleasure. Let's hope Thomas Herpich can survive in the wilds long enough to develop into an even more mature and interesting artist. I will sit and watch for while, taking notes...
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