Things are not told us directly, but one can unlock a more or less linear, Aristotelian storyline from the matter that is given throughout the chapters of the first story, the titular “Spiral.” A female artist seems to be living in, or moving into, a sort of commune, or a house somewhere within a rural or at least rustic landscape, away from the urban hullabaloo. Perhaps there is a snippet of autobiography here, but that is not important. There are chapters, or parts, and they may not be in chronological order. Perhaps we’re reading “present” moments at one point, and then “memories” and “flashbacks.” There’s no way to tell. Other characters appear, all women, and all of them have their own relationship with the places they inhabit. The snippets of dialogue, the protagonists’ questions, show us that she is, to a certain extent, “an outsider” who’s butting in not only a space, a biome, but an already established unit between people and place, their own history with one another, and the negotiation for her to enter it is not going to be easy or eased. Still, there no drama here. A “spiral” can be seen as a ongoing movement of approach and distance, ever closing in, towards a desidered center, but perhaps never arriving at the “end.” This is about belonging. In the gerund: a present continuous.
Collecting two previously published stories and two unpublished pieces, the NYRC is expanding once again the diversity of materiality, sources, languages, genres and styles of comics in their small (to date) yet riveting collection. Koch’s four stories are short, but they are also “brief” in a more literary, poetic sense. In Pierre Alferi’s Brefs, we read the following: “Being brief has never been about being short.” in ohter words, “micro-narratives” does not mean necessarily having a relationship with (a small) size, but rather with something that brings the very notion of narrativity into (a positive, a creative) crisis, where teleology, causality, space-time organization, or the putative psychological depth of the given characters are concerned. Other effects are sought for. Other effects that may even lead us to talk about poetry.
Aidan Koch is not a stranger to comics-making that had added the adjective “poetic” to her practice. From The Whale and The Blonde Woman and Q to After Nothing Comes, Little Angels and other books, Koch belongs to a globally scattered yet cohesive group of artists that have explored comics not through spectacularity but rather inwardness, ellipsis, reshuffling the possibilities of a book’s reading strategies, and other phantasmatical meaning-making approaches. These dimensions emerge not only from the rhythm of her page composition and ellusive panel transitions and sparse dialogue, but the off-kilter focuses, fragmentary sentences, blotchy colorwork, silences and blanks that take over the marked pages. And also from the “storylines,” no matter how friable they may be.
In the first story, the even-numbered chapters tell the parallel story of two rivers that are born in two separate mountains, distant from one another, and then converge in a single spot and mix their waters for the remaining course. A blatant metaphor of confluence and communication and compromise, the poetics of the words and the seemingly schematic paintings of these scenes are, at one time, a commentary upon the human-centered drama, a metaphor, a “version”, an unfolding, an affirmation of the human-biome relationships. Whether of contrast or community, is open to the reader. But, at times, the water (and the mountains, etc.) are also treated as human-like, with memories and feelings and doubts, so perhaps the community feeling is stronger. And at one point, the paintings give way to two watery creatures. This is a true visual metaphor (in Noël Carrol’s precise, technical sense), because we see, at one time, the two entities in the same image, without ever letting go of one or the other. Is that not precisely the idea of community?
The other stories are quite different in tone, such as “New Year,” that sounds almost like a kind-friendly fable, “The Forest,” acting like a sort of travel and sketch notebook (a little like Koch’s El Color de la Selva), and “Man Made Lake,” a strange mix of dreamy postcard collage work (sort of Parajanov on paper) mixed with oneiric therapy. But they are always going back to the same themes: communion with nature, creating roots, and perhaps sometimes, losing sight of what separates one thing from the other. Becoming. Belonging.
The “Spiral” chapters that talk about the river (or it it “rivers”? It’s as if the very plural identity of the river is as fluid as water) show us watercolor drawings. So the text might as well be talking not about the storyworld’s river, as a character in the story, but the actual “waters” that make up the drawings themselves. As we read “The water never thought about what would happen”/ “how it would transform/how it would grow + dissolve”/ “how it would lose the shape of its body” / “it was just moving” could be read as a self-conscious comics poem speaking about itself, in its present materiality, its actuality, as it’s being both created and read. In the first instance, when it is being drawn and written and composed and edited by the empirical artist, i.e., in four “different moments,” and in the second instance, in the moment of its final reception, during the act of reading. Multiple moments (rivers) that become one single moment (a river).
Materiality is a word often repeated when reading analytically Aidan Koch’s work. Because everything, from the penciled frames to the wide margins to the scribbled words, has a “weight” not of “symbol” or “representation” but of “being.” A scene showing a travel by night train – how do I know this? Am I abusing my interpretation? – puts the words displayed as crooked yet straight lines, as if showing the intersections and detours of the train lines that are traversed. Sometimes the handwritten words become hard to decipher, as if showing the urgency and speed of its expression. And nothing of this means carelessness or a kind of “whatever” attitude towards the art of comics-making. I love the virtuoso pyrotechnics as much as the next guy, but these things can be achieved through many manners.
As a matter of fact, I know that Koch is able to paint beautifully and detailedly rendered landscapes in watercolor (I mentioned this before a propos the exhibition and the book-catalogue Selva). I know that this is a weak argument, but I do so in order to prevent readings that may not follow the meaningfulness of using white space, changing structures for the landscape from panel to panel when “logic” would ask for continuity. Fluidity is key. Ambiguousness is central. Musicality is always present. Perhaps, in an oblique manner, Koch is retrieving the magic shifting landscapes of a George Herriman, yet another comics artist in love with the desert. A desert and a forest, on paper, are the same: they shift from page to page. Perhaps we will find firm ground. Perhaps not. But we shift with them.
Final note: thanks to the artist and the publisher for the book’s copy. Images pilfered from the publisher’s website.
Yellow Fast & Crumble 
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