Thomas Herpich's Gongwanadon received a lot of positive feedback when it came out in early July and I've been excited about getting my hands on a copy for a while. Jeff Mason's Alternative Comics have been hurting lately, so when I was in the Beguiling a couple of weeks ago I made a point of picking some of their books and this was one of them.

It took several reads for me to get my head around this comic; my first impression was that the artwork was really sharp with big half page panels and loose but controlled brush work. My second impression was that most of it had been drawn while chilling out from an acid trip. Even if this wasn't actually the case, it was definitely meant to be a direct expression of the creator's subconscious, which is good and a bad thing.

Herpich has said that it's a book about "personal responsibility and relationships". I'm going to make some pressumptions here that could be very wrong, but my guess is that was written by somebody who was young enough to have some experience in relationships, but not too much experience. The reason I think this is because it has been my experience that art dealing with love can lean towards abstraction when there is no actual person to direct the love feelings towards. After all, without a two-way exchange, love is just an abstraction.

The first strip, Labyrinth, features two humanoid creatures sitting together in darkness. They’re a couple, and during the course of a monologue by one of them, we learn that the labyrinth "symbolises love or what might be love." This could be taken in several different ways:
a. He doesn't trust his audience to figure out the symbolism
b. it's some sort of post-modern commentary on the nature of symbolism
c. Rather than consciously impinging meaning on the story and taking away from its purity, Herpich decide to leave the story exactly as he wrote it at a first go without any editing.
If I'd written the piece and was applying for an art grant, or presenting the piece to an art school class, I'd probably say that my intention was b. but my instincts tell me that the real answer is c.

Gongwandon's central story features an alien looking creature that has resemblance to a Skrull (a regular enemy of the Fantastic Four for all non-superhero-indoctrinated readers). As with the first story, it seems to be set nowhere in particular. A disembodied voice repeatedly tells the Skrull-like character that it doesn't believe him. We are not filled in on what the voice doesn't believe, but the Skrull quickly concurs with the voice because, "I am young and the captain is wise". All statements seem to be open to contradiction in the story, and again, it reminded me of the angtsy, ephemeral inner dialogues that I subjected myself to in my early twenties. One element combining many of these stories is a dominating voice that is trying to manipulate the characters.

The Captain appears later in the story on the deck of a spaceship, and if the big penis about to be inserted into a non-specific vagina is any clue, appears to be trapped in a sexual reverie in which he could remain forever. Someone wearing a german army-helmet circa WWII named Crybird takes the Captain against his will to the planet's surface, and he actually ends up liking the new place, but never-the-less returns to the ship, abandoning Crybird. The characters seem to symbolize elements of the conscious and unconscious brain and that Herpich is creatively struggling with what voice should dominate. If this is the case then it seems that the story might be saying is that even when Herpich tries to depend solely on his subconscious his conscious brain will somehow manage to sabotage it.

Uurogo's 18 Demons features an amazing jump of imagination that I would loved to have read another fifty or so pages of and I felt short changed that it didn't continue for more than two. I would have also liked to have seen more of the short strips that I found to much more evocative, engaging and disturbing than the longer stories he chose to focus on. The all text Relaxation seemed like an encapsulation of what Herpich was trying to do with the comic. He dreams "A pair of giant armoured hands, supported a limp but terrified body vber a black chasm." and imagines what would happen if he falls, "masturbate in public, molest children, maybe never get out of bed again."

Remember those vague angsty feelings about love that young people are prone to I mentioned earlier? I've often thought that they were simply distractions from that gaping existential chasm. That's kind of what I think about this comic. If Herpich can get beyond these somewhat adolescent preoccupations and manage to reconcile the fascistic tendencies of his conscious mind with the terrifyingly limitless intelligence of his subconscious, he'll be able to create comics that will be really astounding, and that I can't even begin to imagine. I look forward to reading them.

Here's what some other people think:

Digital Webbing
Ninth Art

and his website.