LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR 2025! Mereida Fajardo is probably largely known for her tactile comics work; practice the physicality of which is a key ingredient in its presentation. But first and foremost Fajardo is an active experimenter with the form, an artist with a keen and probing mind, constantly reevaluating what can be achieved with the medium by prodding and poking at traditional methods of delivery. It will come as no surprise to anyone then that her LDComics Online Comics Fair offering The Keluarga Cable Ship Company leans heavily into the unique possibilities of digital, with a long continuous scrolling comic.
In her recent exclusive Inside Look creator commentary on the project here at Broken Frontier Fajardo said: “It was a little terrifying… embarking on this project. I applied to the fair wanting to push myself to try something new, and as with all the projects, I wanted the design of it to work intrinsically with the story inside. This being a digital comics fair, my aim was to devise a comic inextricable from its digital form, however strange and out-of-character it feels to not be printing this comic on paper.”
The Keluarga Cable Ship Company presents three distinctive but interlinked narrative strands, all appearing in their own downwards scrolling section of the page, left, centre and right. A comic that focusses on a ship involved with the installation and maintenance of the subsea telecommunications cables that carry almost all international internet communications may seem a little… niche. But this is a Mereida Fajardo offering where all such worries will quickly be dispersed.
The story hinges on a father-son relationship and a clash of ideas old and new. The son, a software engineer, has arrived to install IT applications on one of the ships tasked with the upkeep of the deep sea cables. One that also happens to be the same vessel his estranged father works on as a caretaker. The first two sections recount these same events with an emphasis on the vantage points of the two different protagonists, time overlapping, speech balloons skewing between the two, and perspective switching. Their narratives then diverge and become separate processions but ones that still continue to weave in and out of each other.
Thematically this conflict between generations embeds something much more profound in these initial disagreements about the validity of the old versus the new. The third downwards sequence flashes back in time, gradually revealing the prime source of the fracturing of the relationship between father and son. It’s quite brilliant in construction as parallel events open up in different streams of experience, and our understanding of the greater story is manipulated and shifted so dexterously. That’s the great triumph of The Keluarga Cable Ship Company – just how fundamentally its format changes how we interact with the (one long) page and how that affects how we perceive and connect with events.
If you love comics that play and toy and tease with language of comics, with work that not simply experiments but actually redefines what comics can do as a form, and a story that is innovative, challenging and groundbreaking then The Keluarga Cable Ship Company is for you. This is genius level understanding of the unique potential of comics from Mereida Fajardo.
Mereida Fajardo (W/A) • LDComics Online Comics Fair, £5.00
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.
