A couple of years back at Broken Frontier I reviewed Kristina Stipetic’s bumper-sized collection Positive Worlds, Negative Spaces. A huge collection of work originally created between 2010 and 2024, it acted as both a showcase and a retrospective for the artist’s comic strip and illustration work over a decade and a half. Here we are two years later and Stipetic’s fluid visual storytelling style is about to get a spotlight in a more compact piece of comics with the upcoming The Flesh of the World, from newbie micropublisher Other Sun Press.
The Flesh of the World is a science fiction story that allows Stipetic to make the fullest use of her creative toolbox. Set in the strangely organic world of The Vale – a flesh-like environment inhabited by a race of alien-like humanoids – it focusses on the character of Chrell, a priestess about to embark on a pilgrimage that will change her understanding of her life forever…
What initially strikes the reader about The Flesh of the World is the intricacies of the world-building going on here. We have a society with its own history and mythology – the legends of a companion race known as the Zed giving ominous foreshadowing – and a complex relationship with The Vale that raises the question of whether they are living in symbiosis with their world or exploiting it. Indeed, there’s a very philosophical feel to events here as Chrell’s epistemological quest throws up ideas she may not be ready to receive.
Stipetic’s art is a major draw. The eerie otherworldliness of The Vale is mirrored by irregular panel layouts that bring other layers to the organic strangeness of Chrell’s surroundings. Considered use of colour echoes this with a darker colour scheme slowly consuming the earlier brighter colours as events enter more dramatic territory. The result is that we feel immersed in something very alien that, nevertheless, is still strangely familiar for the very recognisable human concerns of its cast of characters.
Experimental sci-fi with something profoundly existential to say, The Flesh of the World is a very promising start from Other Sun Press.
Kristina Stipetic (W/A) • Other Sun Press
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Review by Andy Oliver
