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JENNIFER DAYDREAMER: ANNA & EVA
by Jennifer Daydreamer
(80 pages, $4.95, from
Top Shelf Productions)
Reviewed by Mike Hunter
The tone and meandering style – in art and narrative – of Jennifer Daydreamer's
Anna & Eva makes for a unique comics experience. Guided by a narrator, the flow broken by occasional section titles such as "How Anna Met Her Husband", or digressions such as "Turtle! Story," we wander through the "...fantasy world of Encephalon, a grey wasteland, where costumed people run around in time and space...", as Daydreamer's site notes.
The main setting, as it were, of
Anna & Eva is the Circus Zazel, poetically introduced in a long-shot of breeze-stirred tents, but thereafter shown, oddly, with roomy building interiors, though the usual circus accommodations are tents and cramped trailers. While fairy-tale-like in mood (the creator's site contains a
hommage to Jung, and discussion of his concept of archetypes, crucial figures in fairy tales), this comic's narrative is hazy, drifting here and there, reaching no defined goal but giving a series of "tastes," quite unlike the vivid and solidly wrought stories in fairy tales. Instead, with the seeming arbitrariness of a dream, we jump settings, characters realistic and not so wandering in and out. Anna (proprietor of the circus) and her husband-to-be barely speak to each other in the course of this book, the consummation of their relationship, as with the situations and fates of most (including a female healer wandering barefoot through a forest, a six-fingered, Mephistophelesian swindler) introduced herein, to be perhaps left for a future volume to develop.
Daydreamer's a gifted illustrator - see
www.jenniferdaydreamer.com for her work - and occasionally her renderings in this comic are more fully developed, particularly some faces, drawn with subtlety and sensitivity. Yet most of the art is childlike in its crude simplicity, figures and settings naively primitive, though endowed with charm for all their awkwardness. The story is the polar opposite of an infinitely detailed, watch-mechanism-tight Alan Moore script: allusive, barely-there, yet talent and a refreshingly different creative voice are unmistakably evident. For those who don't mind a lack of substance (the interesting bits and pieces never coalesce) or satisfyingly concluded narrative,
Anna & Eva certainly has delicate mood and gracefulness to spare.
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