“What if we met outside of time? Would we be friends? Or would we never understand each other? There is nothing left to see, but there is much left to feel.” There’s a hauntingly lyrical quality to those words that act as an introduction to Lithuanian creator Ula Rugevičiūtė Rugytė’s ‘Scraps of Memory’, issue #137 of the self-contained mini kuš! comics series.
That’s fitting for a comic that on one hand has an intangible dreamlike quality. Yet, on the other, speaks of trauma the specifics of which may be left to our imaginations but the realities of seem universal. In a wistful dreamscape world two women – one defined and human, the other phantom-like and shadowy – walk together through the countryside looking for the familiar signs of home. As they discuss shared thoughts on the passage of time, escape, conflict, resistance and loss, we slowly begin to piece together their connection and relationship.
Here authorial intent and reader interpretation are allied but can never truly converge into objective clarity. Instead we absorb the story on a more philosophical and emotional level; patterns of historical repetition and the cycle of time coming ever to the fore. There’s an element of finding resolution in the unresolvable here; of making peace with a past that is elusive and fractured. Rugytė’s visuals root this unworld in a quietly ethereal narrative framework. Exactly the kind of work to push the reader into investigating the artist’s work further which is surely a major reason for the mini kuš! line in the first place.
Ula Rugevičiūtė Rugytė (W/A) • kuš! comics, $7.95
Review by Andy Oliver
