My first introduction to the art of Molly Stocks came at Gosh! Comics via Small Press Day last summer which goes to show that SPD can be a journey of discovery for the event’s co-organisers just as much as it is for the attendees. Stocks’ first comics work was published recently by Breakdown Press, those finest purveyors of experimental and avant garde sequential art. Convoy is described as a story about “young siblings in a rural community [who] bond and bicker over a Kris Kristofferson film and a tin full of snails.” On one level that is a suitably enticing, if slightly throwaway, summary but Convoy is also a story that contains existential truths threaded through its pages.
Convoy takes place in the space of at what must be at most a handful of hours and could perceivably be far, far less. Of our two young siblings Sam has collected a tin full of snails of which he has formed a deep bond with, naming them and explaining their behaviour to his sister. We observe the two on a lazy day around the environs of their small, isolated country home, experiencing their world from an entirely child’s eye view without the encumbrance of adult perceptions; an existence where their pop cultural consumption casually bleeds into the everyday, and where time takes on a hazy indistinctness.
Stocks’ art is beautifully delicate in realisation, often panning away from our two cast members and into the wider countryside that surrounds them. This facet of the comic provides us with a sense of the bucolic and subtly ensures the reader feels they, too, are centred in this natural, rural kingdom. It’s a locale that has a feeling of dreamy realism with the two characters having a more stripped back and caricatured look to them, heightening their emotional states and establishing the readers’ connection to their interactions and sense of innocence.
What’s so carefully portrayed here, with a quiet but profound nuance, is the intricacies of sibling relationships; how relative trivialities can feel like betrayals, and how the ordinary and the banal can encapsulate the devastating from the viewpoint of the guileless. Convoy is also a reminder that comics is a form that is as effective at bringing us into life’s quieter but no less profound moments as it is at presenting labyrinthine and complex plotting. This is the greatest strength of Convoy – its universality and its ability to transport us back to a point in time when we saw the world in a very different way. A strikingly assured yet appealingly fragile debut comic.
Molly Stocks (W/A) • Breakdown Press, £12.00
Review by Andy Oliver
