Broken Frontier

New publisher Blank Slate Books mission statement is to 'contribute to the growing groundswell of interesting comics publishing by producing books that the market might not otherwise ever see in print'. And they're off to a flying start, I must say. Their first published venture was Oliver East's Trains are mint and now they have gone for Germany's top alternative talent Mawil. It must be said that Top Shelf beat them to it by publishing Mawil's Beach Safari in 2003, but that's water under the bridge said the old woman as she pissed into the sea. We can still be friends is a bit of another beast.

We can still be friends is Mawil's second book, while Beach Safari was also drenched in the self-examination mode that comes with relationships, hardships and loneliness, low self-esteem and butterflies, it also possessed a surreal mode by placing it's protagonists on a deserted island with a talking bunny. In WCSBF, Mawil aims his telescope firmly at the real world and his own experiences with girls in his teenage years - cue time-travel to your own teenage self that you wanted to hit over the head with a bat so many times when it comes to girls -, universal appeal is a proper name for this theme.

The book is divided into four stories with interlocking scenes connecting the stories into one tapestry. Content-wise, all stories are about Mawil failing in making a deeper connection with the girls he falls in love with. It's preceded by bouts of angst, failure and rejection; placing the girls on impossible to reach pedestals so that he can never hope to ascend to their level thereby making a fall unavoidable. Sounds familiar doesn't it? The wisdom of years gained helps to alleviate these fears some - says the writer with hindsight - but when you are a teenager, every time you go through this experience, a little world is destroyed and you're stuck alone in rocket wheezing off to another planet.

Anyway, these little drama's have a good chance of coming off as just plain boring - a disadvantage of using a universal experience so blatantly - but Mawil succeeds in making it so damn entertaining on pure storytelling skills. The in between scenes all have their own style of storytelling that set them apart from the main story and it is pretty impressive how intuitive Mawil uses all types of storytelling - including typography and word balloon placement - to get mood and atmosphere across in combination with such tricks as free-floating panel borders and a loose fluid line for all his characters.

His characters are composed of fluid open line-work, enough to make distinct characters out of but also not too much, intentionally installing in them an open appeal for reader identification. The worlds they inhabit are immediately recognisable, Mawil is pretty good at world-building and a definite child of the late eighties, early nineties. In the background are often in small type lyrics playing that are immediately recognizable like Nirvana or Portishead. He avoids specific locales to focus on the characters and general settings like stuffed apartment buildings full of international students, a camping place with girls and often loads the pages with word balloons to show the chaotic nature of so much youthful energy in one place.

He is a master of composition breaking his strict nine-panel grid only when necessary or infusing it with a renewed energy like the page where he uses a nine panel grid, centering a stairwell in the middle vertical panels and have the panels on the left and right be separate student rooms, filled with action relating to the story while at the same time the stairwell case carries it's own story. Or the page where the repetition of a single image enforces the ennui of the protagonists. Or the page at the camping ground where the perspective is focused on the center panel of the nine panel-grid, being the middle of the circle where the boys and girls are sitting and he rotates the perspective into such an extreme that we get a 180 degrees point of view of all the people sitting around the radio in the middle.

I could go on and on like this. These 'grid-breaks' are not all this noticeable, sometimes you only realize it when you have passed it a few pages further on, but that is a testament to his storytelling skills. Mawil's storytelling is so good that you won't notice it until you finished the story, closed the book and find your mind adrift ...

Blank Slate Books is carving out a nice niche for them in the publishing world: exploring unmined international potential of celebrated comic artists and the English speaking world is all the better for it. We can still be friends by Mawil is a storytelling tour de force look into a teenage world that reads so fluidly and intuitive that you're sucked right in. Highly recommended.

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Follow Blank Slate Books newest releases on their website and while you're at it, check out  Mawil's online home for artwork and news concerning his upcoming books.