Far more appreciation needs to be shown for kuš! comics’ mini kuš! series given the incredible platform it has provided for experimental and alternative comics practitioners for 122 issues now. While their signature s! anthology obviously does something very similar for a global range of creators, their mini kuš! books provide artists with 24 pages to play with and an opportunity for an extended visual narrative. They can be abstract, deconstructive, personal and even, on some occasions, completely baffling. But there’s nothing quite like them out there right now and it’s hardly surprising in the circumstances that mini kuš! output is a perennial favourite in our Broken Frontier Awards.
With a relatively new batch of four having been published in December it’s a prime time to give another mini kuš! entry a spotlight with a look at the pick of the bunch this time around – ‘Link’ by Gary Colin. This is one of those strips that different readers will react to in different ways. Link itself is a kind of digital-looking avatar who invites the reader to take part in a series of meditative exercises that start with familiar wellbeing mantras and then get increasingly bizarre as events progress.
Colin uses rigidly consistent three-panel pages each containing a variation on the same standard shot of Link. His largely static centring given a feeling of activity mostly by the adoption of changing backgrounds and colours, creating the illusion of movement and change. This technique allows Colin to take ‘Link’ in a number of wryly amusing directions that incorporate the self-referential, the surreal and the eccentric. What’s particularly notable here is how imaginatively Colin uses the limited sense of motion inherent in the story’s presentational structure by concentrating on pacing to build up to visual punchlines. Blocky camouflage allows Link to disappear in a Tetris visual gag; a cartwheel is performed with shifts in coloring rather than character; and the vertical hold fluctuates to allow Link to travel up a television screen.
What the reader takes from ‘Link’ will come more from their reactions to the page than their interpretations of it. Mini kuš! issues are always at their best when they are at their most experimental and Colin’s idiosyncratic offering is an excellent example of that.
Gary Colin (W/A) • kuš! comics, $7.95
Review by Andy Oliver
