LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR 2025! Natalie d’Arbeloff has certainly led a truly fascinating life in the arts. You can read more about that on her Wikipedia page here. In comics those who have been around the scene a little longer may be familiar with her practice from her 1980s small press minicomics series Small Packages featuring her on-page avatar Augustine. More recently d’Arbeloff’s work-in-progress graphic novel Double Entendre earned her the Laydeez do Comics’ Rosalind D. Penfold Prize for a comics creator aged over 50 in 2019 . As a nonagenarian d’Arbeloff is also the oldest comics artist we have covered at Broken Frontier. A fact that would perhaps not normally be necessarily of relevance but in the context of her LDComics Fair offering Hindsight is of note as a reminder of the rich seam of lived experience she has to mine for graphic memoir.
Hindsight is a succinct but busy 8-page offering, counting covers and interiors, with the comic strip itself consisting of 4 pages. It’s available in both digital form from the LDComics Fair and as a physical comic in an A4 format. I read it in the latter and, as a tactile object, its vibrant colours and freeform page layouts are rather alluring. It follows d’Arbeloff during her time at art school in the 1950s in Mexico and shows how she first meets and falls in love with a tutor there; one who us twenty years her senior. Their relationship is a strong one but their eventual marriage does not last. The crux of the comic therefore being the way in which we re-evaluate periods of our life with the benefit of the passing years.
There’s a certain universality to that theme even if the particulars here are specific to d’Arbeloff. As an account it feels both wistful and yet somehow quite pragmatic and resigned at the same time. It’s more vignette than structured story but that works well in this context, playing into the somewhat fragmented nature of memory and how it is open to reinterpretation.
It’s d’Arbeloff’s art that will probably be the first thing about Hindsight to capture the reader’s imagination though. The front cover has an impressionistic quality that again encapsulates that dreamy quality of memory, while the interiors use idiosyncratic layouts; less strictly formal panels and more a collection of images on each page jostling against each other for our attention. It gives the comic a somewhat haunting expressionism that suits the idea of past and present converging on each other. Here d’Arbeloff’s use of colour is also heady and intoxicating, adding to that sense of the pull of the past tugging at the present. An excellent example as we start our LDComics Fair coverage of the diversity of the material you are going to see covered here at BF in the next few weeks.
Natalie d’Arbeloff • LDComics Online Fair, £12.00
Review by Andy Oliver
The LDComics Online Comics Fair runs across the month of July. Read all our coverage of the comics on offer here at BF.
