I have just found a completely different type of comic, and it is just what I needed after wrapping up a busy week before a holiday.
Ambient Comics by Nadine Redlich is a collection to induce meditation and quiet observation. Each page has six panels showing an object as time passes. For example, as shown here, the shadow of a stick moving through the day, or a banana aging.
Some — such as the house on fire or the field of wheat — I didn’t immediately see a distinction among the panels, so I had to stop and focus and really pay attention to what I was looking at. That’s good practice. other times, I was pleased by how much she could communicate swiftly in a basic drawing with minimal shapes, as with the silhouette of a plane leaving a contrail across the sky, or the moon seen through a barred window.
Some are less linear than others. The sequence of a cake baking only can be set up one way, but the children’s swings swaying in the wind could nearly be circular. The scale of the images range from interstellar to the most personal (a pimple). and the one of a computer wait symbol is just tweaking the readers.
I never knew what the next page would bring, and I found that exciting, in contrast with the simplicity of the content shown. This is a whimsical read like nothing else I’ve seen.
Ambient Comics is published by Rotopol out of Germany, and the only place I’ve seen it available is their online store (available in English). (The publisher supplied a digital review copy.)
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