Featuring his Immortal Ewan character, Claude TC’s Seller on the Threshold is a prime example of the artist’s particular mix of darkly irreverent humour and pop cultural parody, with a significant helping of social commentary thrown in for good measure. Travelling through the depths of space in their suggestively shaped ship Ewan and engineer Luvvit’s journey is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a monstrous entity aboard their vessel.
Introducing itself as the Seller on the Threshold, the creature is revealed to be “the grim manifestation of an era’s filthy wants”, embodying all those unnecessary online impulse buys, the “customers who shopped for this also bought this” purchases, and the excesses of our internet consumer histories. Ewan and Luvvit must discover a way to overcome the Seller’s bargain deals before they are trapped in its loop in space-time forever…
A bitingly witty satirical take on very contemporary discussions, Seller on the Threshold takes the idea of online targeted marketing and gives it allegorical sci-fi form. The Seller, something of a send-up of Marvel’s cosmic conceptual entities, is used as a device for poking merciless fun at redundant algorithms, digital retail and online information tracking.
TC’s cartooning is fluid and lively, emphasising the often physical comedy of events by cramming every panel full of detail and keeping white space at the barest minimum. It gives Seller on the Threshold a frantic and hectic sense of pacing, with a telling line in visual characterisation underscoring the comedic relationship between the two central characters. A self-contained entry point to one of the UK small press’s most inventive cartoonists.
For more on the work of Claude TC visit his site here and online store here.
Review by Andy Oliver
Claude TC will be a guest artist at this month’s Gosh! Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw on Thursday February 27th.
