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TELL TALE SIGNS
by Lonnie Allen
(40 pages, b&w mini, $1.00 from
Squid Works; published by
dAdA graphics)
Review by Mike Hunter
*One of the sketchbook pages within David Collier’s new
The Frank Ritza Papers book (D&Q) mentions, “The Canadian designer Paul Arthur created a new, pictographic language for the World’s Fair in Montreal – Expo ‘67 – that quickly spread around the world...” We’ve seen these minimal symbols on washroom doors, telling us where to find a phone, escalator or ski-lift. There are
hundreds of different ones and variations - I recycled a hand from a "stop" sign to create the brand-new "applause" icon, above - some stylized into incomprehensibility. (One "woman" symbol looks like a silhouetted woodwind instrument!)
These featureless, geometric little entities have acted in brief sequences before, but now Lonnie Allen’s crisply-produced and consistently funny
Tell Tale Signs has them star in a book-length tale. In
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud suggested that simplified, "iconic" characters facilitate audience identification more than realistically rendered ones, and indeed - though he showed "cartoony" characters as examples - it's odd how easily here one is pulled into empathizing with the travails of One Bad Day in a nameless chap's life.
He exits his job with countless others, fends off requests from panhandlers. Dialogue's conveyed via word-balloons carrying the appropriate symbol, sometimes aided by a "?" or "!". Over much liquour consumption, he attempts to pick up a woman in a bar, has a fight with a recalcitrant ATM, and during a boozy, rainy drive afterward, we see the "slippery-when-wet" skidding-car road sign, then the familiar duo of youths from "school crossing."
Oh, NO! His car upside-down and in flames, he ends up pursued by police dogs, struck by lightning, and his troubles are far from over...
In
Tell Tale Signs, Lonnie Allen's wrought an amusingly bleak story, his cleverness, wit and sense of pacing and design well displayed. Further, here's another title to add to that "Best comics to show someone not
into comics" list. It's eminently accessible, in the best sense of the word.
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