The annual Manga Jiman competition has provided us with a number of comics to review over the years thanks to entrants and winners going on to self-publish print editions of their entries. These have included shorts like Chloe Starling’s Even Androids Dream and even an anthology featuring winning entrants in the shape of Cross#atch’s Hatchlings. Indeed Shangomola Edunjobi and Alxndra Cook, two of our Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ creators in recent years, have placed in the competition as winner and runner-up respectively.
Nancy ArtMusic’s Legato Loss, the first part in her Creative Chronicles series, is another such legacy comic the competition has spawned. This 8-page tale is an account of the artist’s long-held desire to become a professional musician after years of study, the eventual realisation of how that probably wasn’t going to happen as life steered her away from her dreams, and the cathartic acceptance of how that consequence wasn’t necessarily the personal disaster she had always imagined it would be.
Interestingly enough, slice-of-life work often benefits immensely from a rawer approach and a focussed vision; one that concentrates on communicating experience rather than studied visual elaboration. Nancy ArtMusic’s art is admittedly sometimes naïve in realisation but this only serves to make Legato Loss feel more authentic in presentation. In some indefinable way we become closer to the artist by experiencing events with their unrefined visual foibles and all.
Legato Loss is an undoubtedly specific and personal piece of graphic memoir – one that inarguably serves to express the emotions that the artist felt in a moment of defeated epiphany – but it also has a universality that will echo events in the lives of many of its readers. And ultimately that quality and level of communication is the most essential part in any form of sequential art.
Nancy ArtMusic (W/A) • Self-published. £5.00
Review by Andy Oliver
