In the decade passed, a lot of trendy summer comixfags were agog about certain Big Buzzy Names like mould map and Kramer's Ergot-- hipster Raws, the lot of 'em --Mirror Mirror has been the artcomix anthology that's endured, for me. It takes its time, and it drops when it drops, and it's not counting on people who love the internet to give a fuck: it's there for people who love COMIC BOOK ART. If we arrive at Mirror Mirror via the internet that's all to the good but that's not what the book is being put out there for. It's being published to be comics, and it's consistently stunning and excellent at that: Art- does not need to be prefixed to the word Comics, because art is the totality of the work presented: art which happens to be innate TO comics. Mirror Mirror is a lovely little curated space, each issue. There's 4. I'm looking forward to much, much more.
This anthology was published in 2017, and I have waited a decently long time to read it.
I wait a long time to appreciate certain bits of art. I don't let capitalism steer my ability to love art. I made myself rules, long and forever ago, about how to appropriate Things which I love, for my many, many libraries-- rules, because I am obsessive-compulsive, and if I permitted myself, I would be buried in a hoard of books to rival the comingled hordes of my bibliophile parents: a veritable deadly tumult of collapsed shelves. There must be limitations. You can't move all that pulp. Yet I love and require physical books, so I don't buy a thing off the fucking internet, generally if-at-all, because the rarest treasures are best appreciated when encountered in the wild.
If it's in a shop somewhere and you weren't looking for it, then it's Even Better.
What tipped me into buying Mirror Mirror II off the fucking internet, at last, was the realization that Al Columbia has a SWATH of pages in there, 10 in all. That's a massive drop from an artist who only surfaces in print every other decade. Columbia has been haunting me ever since I first encountered 'Tar Frogs' in Deadline Magazine. (Have I mentioned I love anthology comix?) I bought Biologic Show #1 when it was first published by Fanta, because some pervert in a basement comic shop in Dogwater, Alabama ordered 3 copies. The first time I dropped acid in my teenage room, waiting for the vascular pulse of the norwegian wood to synch up with Danny Hyde's remix of 'Gave Up', I re-read 'Tar Frogs' and 'Biologic Show' back to back, staring dowwwn into the panel where Pim peels back the cuff of his cartoon Mickey Mouse glove to glimpse the squamous flagellum of his repression. Ugh.
There was something compellingly bent about Columbia's art, something twitching with danger, and I felt some form of Recognition-- same reaction I had to Clive Barker, same reaction I had to William S. Burroughs --a recognition so deeply personal that when I ran away from home in the dead of night, The Biologic Show #1 was one of a handful of comix in my go bag.
I didn't learn anything about Columbia-the-man until this past year, when I finally listened to his two very raw Inkstuds interviews. (That archive's down, or I'd throw a link up. Sorry.) I try not to learn too much about the artists I feel syzygy with because it muddies my essential Perception of them: I stop Seeing their work and I start Interpreting, instead. Sometimes I want neither nits in my grits nor grits amidst my nits. So anyhow, I listened, and discovered my affection in part may stem from a sense that if my life had gone differently, I'd have veered a little more along Columbia's own awkward, faltering route.
It's no small thing, accepting a role in Art's life. Because it's not the art Life, the way that shit's sold to you. Reality is, your time, your life, belongs to Art. So I don't kvetch about how Columbia's approached the release of his work; that he releases it at all, that he sells bits and shavings off his own compulsive psyche, is a marvel. It's no small thing, negotiating your worth in the chattel market and keeping sane. So too, are the number of Columbia's pages in Mirror Mirror II no small thing.
The best comes to those who wait. I feel like these ten pages will be a Best on par with the Amnesia drop. I still haven't found that In The Wild, either... But I'm not resorting to ebay just yet.
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