LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR 2025! Authorial intent and reader inference do not always have to align for a successful comics narrative. Indeed, finding our own truths in work that may be more abstract, oblique or open to multiple interpretations is a totally valid process. In Good Day 2024 Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ artist Zhenyi Zheng provides one such story. A minicomic that has its own delicate symbolism and an alluring lyrical quality to its pages.
Zheng is no stranger to work that invites reader interpretation. I made the same point when I reviewed her comic Summer Maze earlier this year. Good Day is the tale of a girl on a journey to the end of the world, seeking completion having lost one of her wings. There she will encounter her counterpart. But will their meeting bring a sense of union and fulfilment or is she destined to remain fragmented?
Work like this asks us to think, consider and even reapply its visual metaphor to our own situations or experiences. There are obvious themes that can be drawn out from its pages of course. Ideas of identity, of finding one’s self, of loneliness and of acceptance. But each reader may find something different to take from events.
Again, Zheng’s work here shows an enquiring mind keen to experiment with form and structure. Panels can sit within other images to play with context and perspective. Colour is a key signifier with rich reds used emblematically to hint at deeper truths, and a careful use of language bringing us more deeply into the realities of the girl’s quest. From work like Banana Trap through to Summer Maze Zheng’s practice stands out for its experimentation and often haunting qualities. Good Day ably continues in that tradition.
Zhenyi Zheng (W/A) • LDComics Online Fair, £3.00
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.
