The New York Review of pood

Spontaneously generated expression begets self-executing appreciation. Who would be stronger, Jack Kirby or Francis Bacon? Kevin Mutch’s “Super Love People” gets to the brutal simplicity and throbbing inner layers of primal pop battle and classical grotesquery, a distant narrative glimmering like doves of hope tolling inside dark iron shells. The encoded storyline and tactile communication of body memory and evolutionary amnesia course through Henrik Rehr’s bacteriological mural and Hans Rickheit’s visceral catacombs. Not just sequential but simultaneous narrative flashes understanding through every act and quadrant of Bishakh Som’s glacial glass houses and mid-topian family drama and Tobias Tak’s lifecycling world-treehouse. Childhood regained, in its awkwardness and anxieties, that is, offsets a reverse image of comics past’s mischief and innocence in Fintan Taite’s and Lance Hanson’s respective broadsides, the Frank McCourt and David Lynch of the cartoon page; while the farce of history replays itself in the luminous dinge of Geoff Grogan’s “Café Oopzoo”. Who knew there’d be two Westerns on the indie fringe frontier? Andres Vera Martinez and Connor Willumsen, spilling blood-feud epics joined in progress and running forever. Joe Infurnari’s hobos weather the death of America’s religion of limitlessness on weathered newsprint parchment; Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca’s special-op ape goes down shooting with America’s mythic honor in blazing Saturday-animation gels. Paolo Leandri wanders the gray-noir sideroads of a collective memory contracted out to the camera eye, though I can’t comment on his taste in collaborators. Mark Sunshine and Chris Capuozzo, graffiti on the tumbling barriers of pop properness; Sara Edward-Corbett, a calligraphy of comicstrips’ genetic fiber. You can quote me.