LDCOMICS ONLINE COMIC FAIR 2025! Moi Tu’s A Eye (the title a play on artificial intelligence) is a difficult comic to define. Perhaps that’s because in many ways it’s a stark reflection of the times we live in; an era so beset by social injustice and a descent into sinister populism that we struggle to make any sense of how we came to be here. Subtitled ‘Lighting Up the Mirror to Racism’ creator Moi Tu says on the LDComics Fair website that it was originally started as a study of the effect of AI before it took a diversion and became a discussion about racism instead.
The first thing to note here is that this is one of the uneasiest reads you’ll have from the LDC offerings this year, and that’s entirely appropriate because it means A Eye is doing its job. What we have here is a 50-ish page visual essay on how embedded racism is in society; one that uses a stream-of-consciousness commentary together with often abstract imagery to bring us into its dark procession of ideas and observations.
Depending on your definitions, A Eye is perhaps classable as graphic narrative than comics. It’s less sequential panel-to-panel storytelling and more a sprawling (yet always engaging) monologue about oppression, systemic abuses of power and the inescapable influence of bigotry. Moi Tu moves from collage to illustrated narration to simple pages of powerful scribbled notes. But readers could spend an age trying to break down each and every one of her pages and the points they make for more considered appreciation.
The approach of A Eye blends a consideration of specific events, including the Black Lives Matter movement, the uneasy-to-navigate toxicity that is integrated into our surroundings, and the role of privilege in sustaining tyranny as the status quo. It’s material that asks us to consider when and even if we can ever break out of the same repetitive cycles.
This is powerful and damning work that uses dark and hauntingly entrancing images to ask us to think about both racism and anti-racism in a way that I have never quite seen before. A comic that really does need to be experienced as much as it does to be read.
Moi Tu (W/A) • LDComics Online Comics Fair, £9.00
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.