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BLINK
by Dennis Lo
($3.95; distributed by the
Small Press Association)
Review by Mike Hunter
There are failures in the arts which at least are honorably achieved by an Icarus-like striving beyond their inexperienced creators' capacities. Such is the case with
Blink #1, first of a planned trilogy, with a story featuring several interlocking characters - a butcher, parapsychology researcher, and porn star (!) - plus themes and plot lines elaborate enough to take a master of the art form like Alan Moore to carry off. But Moore started small indeed, honing his craft, learning to capture the interest of readers and create vivid characters, while laboring in genre fare over a period of many years. Even then, with all the gifts at his disposal and the rep he'd rightly acquired, his more esoteric fare - except
From Hell, which hung onto the bloody coattails of Jack the Ripper - has hardly attained popular success. So I can both respect and shake my head in disappointment over Dennis Lo's admirable ambition in what is apparently his first comic and the less-than-stellar results.
Blink starts with three pages devoted to an absurd folk tale, illustrated in the style of ancient paintings of the Middle and Far East, its connection to the main story - at least in this volume - insufficient to merit the space. But one of the highlights of the comic follows, a sequence detailing Marty, the butcher's, attempts to concentrate on a book during a train ride, while passengers on cell phones, their banal blather well captured, and the scraping of one filing her fingernails, distract maddeningly. Well done! Marty's needed at a facility where cattle are slaughtered in the inhumane, traditional Kosher fashion, since the regular workers have fallen ill. (Mad Cow Disease is scheduled to play a part in the planned-for future issues.) The butchery is solemnly detailed, then we switch to the elaborate couplings and "money shot" of a porn production. Afterward, Dion, the sullen, Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike star, fails to pick up a girl at a disco - I'll spare you the dialogue - then we see Cassie attempting with equal lack of success to justify her parapsychological researches at her job, an institute of neuroscience research. Back home, the news on her TV has stories of cattle mutilation, a woman's disappearance after visiting a club. (Yes, the same one who'd rejected Dion.)
Afterward Cassie meets with Marty, a childhood friend, who supplies her with cattle parts for her after-hours, "real" research, and discusses her theories regarding the holographic workings of the brain, the "phantom limb" phenomenon - when amputees still
feel the missing part - and her need for a human subject to work with. At a coffee shop, Dion throws a fit ("You
call that a
cappuccino?"), then sulks, an angry aura sparking around him. Suddenly a car plows through the shop's plate-glass window, a spectacular shot whose impact is lessened by an obscuring excess of detail. While broken glass flies about him, Dion stands, unfazed, and says, "You...missed...me!" (Did his rage psychically
cause the crash?) A strikingly composed page.
Several problems prevent
Blink from achieving its desired impact. Yet most are easily resolved, and this is where input from a good editor looking at roughs would have been invaluable. Alas, self-publishers lack this resource. And friends might not be able to discern problem areas, or be afraid to give feedback which would be considered hurtful.
The "folk tale" brings the plot to a grinding halt: at the
very beginning! If it's so thematically important to later parts of the story, it could be broken up into segments, inserted here and there after the reader's been "hooked."
Comics art need not be simple, but should "
read" easily. Strong, boldly outlined shapes, touches of lighting and composition draw the eye to what's important, take attention from what isn't. The art in
Blink is skilled, some parts exquisitely drawn - I could see a smaller comics publisher hiring Lo, though he's not ready for the big leagues yet - and shows talent and promise for further improvement. But it's been apparently printed with a halftone screen too fine for the pulp stock (ink "bleeds" more in rough paper), leaving the watercolor washes overly dark. These murky halftones, often being visually "busy," tend to overwhelm the graceful, delicate inking.
The type is
far too small, squeezed into misshapen balloons. And in places where big chunks of type overlap the artwork, though Lo attempts to compensate by reversing some works mid-sentence where the background is dark, many parts are still virtually unintelligible. (There are various solutions for the latter. A simple one is to place white type on top of a copy of the same type in black, slightly off-register, so that the black wording acts as a drop-shadow and sufficiently delineates the type when the background is too light.) Imagine the word-balloons of comics as equivalent to a movie soundtrack. If so, Blink would have one where you must strain to hear the dialogue, in places the words half-drowned by static.
Frequent typos and bits of awkwardness in the language (such as characters speaking with unnatural formality in contexts where casualness is called for) indicate Lo's familiarity with English is not complete, and some proofreading and input from a native speaker should have been sought out.
Great care and hard work have been lavished on
Blink. While some parts feel intended to make the work more "commercial" (the porn-filming scenes, the car crash), overall the characters are more complex than in mainstream comics fare. Lo strives to deal with grand issues. He's obviously intelligent and well-read: Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay, starring a butcher named "Marty," is given
hommage, a Vermeer painting is featured on a Tarot card. He takes no short-cuts in his art. Settings are elaborately detailed, chiaroscuro beautifully employed at times. He has talent, brains, and ambition. By dealing with those factors which handicap his comics from communicating effectively, he might well have a bright future in the field.
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