After "King," a "Scream Queen"

Black Astronaut
After "King," a "Scream Queen"
By Leroy Douresseaux
July 17, 2005 - 21:43

Fantagraphics Books
Writer(s): Ho Che Anderson
Penciller(s): Ho Che Anderson
Cover Artist(s): Ho Che Anderson
ISBN: 1-56097-651-9

Mr. Charlie #62:

So I read a short graphic novel recently that made me reconsider for a short while how comics or comix work as a storytelling medium:

SCREAM QUEEN

A young woman named Avril finds herself stranded on a desert road after her automobile, a Silver Cloud, breaks down. An older woman gives her a lift back to her dad’s filling station, where they talk for a while, revealing bits and pieces about their lives. The older woman leaves for a rendezvous with a man, where we discover upon what side of the living this mysterious woman is and why she’s meeting an old boyfriend.

SCREAM QUEEN is artist Ho Che Anderson’s first comix work since his three-part biography-extraordinaire, King concluded. Under a fabulous and eye-catching oil-on-canvas cover (my favorite thus far this calendar year), Anderson delivers, in Scream Queen, more of his fabulous expressionistic work. Awash in heavy blacks, jagged positive spaces, and occasional splashes of sensationally, warm colors, Anderson creates a graphic narrative that is as about as close to film-noir photography as comics can get. Anderson creates storytelling that captivates and satisfies the way good short films do.

I recently found a cartoonist who described her work as sequential illustrated narrative. This is Anderson. He creates comix that aren’t an amalgam of prose and drawings. The entire contents of the page, everything the reader/viewer sees in each individual frame is a whole, not a collection of separates. While Scream Queen is not a great example of the horror genre, it treks Anderson’s progress toward comix that is only a distant relative of prose and illustrations. His work is something complete, where words are not less or more than the drawing; they are an element, a part of the whole composition.

In the last few years, Anderson has received more attention than he ever had before because he concluded King in 2003, and the book collection was also released earlier this year. Honestly, his work as a comix artist goes beyond merely being the cartoonist who did a great work about Dr. Martin Luther King. He is finding a new voice for comix and a language that may borrow from other mediums, but won’t be dependent upon them for life. He is one of the few explorers, the few pioneers in North American comic books, moving into new territory, and it’s about damn time more people recognize.

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