DANCEby John Hankiewicz
($8.00 from
John Hankiewicz or
The Holy Consumption. Also available in the
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Reviewed by Tim O'NeilJohn Hankiewicz produces comics of a confidently enigmatic nature, balancing challenging bits of formalistic sleight-of-hand with ominous narrative.
Dance is a perfectly conceived mini, a small rectangular booklet bound by string and personalized with stamps. The thick pages give the book a significant heft.
I'm not sure that I understand the main feature, "Amateur Comics", but I am pretty certain that any failure to grok is purely my shortcoming and not the story's. Hankiewicz is playing a complicated game with the passage of time between panels and the use of ordinary objects to communicate complicated emotional states. There's a lot to parse here, as the narrative more precisely resembles a logic puzzle than an actual story. What it is, however, is haunting and assured, a confident experiment that has kept me engrossed for multiple rereadings.
There are a multitude of features, including what appear to be (but are probably not) sketchbook pages on the subject of dancing, as well as a shorter narrative ("The Kimball House") that reproduces a bizarre conversation in a totally abstract field of shapes and texture. The closest thing I've seen to the Kimball House is probably Mark Beyer's "Amy & Jordan", only taken one step further from the realm of literal representation and completely into new and complicated areas of visual / verbal interplay. Again, this is an incredibly dense work, requiring the reader to comprehend an increasingly abstruse set of visual symbology to understand the passage of time purely through the use of typography.
I had encountered Hankiewicz's work before in anthologies, but this is the first concentrated exposure I've had to his work on its own.
Dance is an extremely impressive work, and I'd be extremely surprised if it didn't turn a few heads in the world of alternative comics.
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