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  1. Culture
16 December 2012

Review: Windowpane

A comic book which looks like nothing else on shelves at the moment.

By Alex Hern

Windowpane is likely to be the best looking book you will hold this year. The comic, from new indie publisher Breakdown Press, is rather unassuming when closed. Stapled spines, soft covers, and a relatively standard size mean that you may expect it to be a standard small-press piece: nice black-and-white art, printed relatively cheaply, and then bound with a smarter cover.

In fact, the book acts as a showcase, of sorts, for a style of printing called risograph which, according to the printers, “sits in the realm somewhere between screen print and offset lithography, but with a unique aesthetic.” It’s not that rare, and a few other books have been printed with the same technique – Philippa Rice’s Soppy, for instance – but Windowpane is the first to feel like it was drawn specifically for it.

The effect really has to be seen to be understood, but it leads to a book which looks like nothing else on shelves at the moment. Each page is more the sort of print which one would pick up from an art fair in East London than a part of a book. Printing a whole book with the technique is almost certainly not an idea which scales up – in other words, even if Joe Kessler’s work makes it to the mainstream, don’t bet on anything looking quite as good as this.

Windowpane is an anthology, of sorts, with Kessler providing all the art and most of the words (the exception being a 12 page collaboration with Kenyan writer Reuben Mwaura). The stories within largely share a dreamlike quality. A couple walk through an eternally burning landscape, getting closer and closer to the fire itself, where they find a flaming stag; a man, spurned by his lover, flees in his car and and hits a bull; an ambassador’s conversation with his queen takes an unexpected turn.

All are illustrated in variants of Kessler’s simple style, which uses thick blocks of colours and basic linework to varying effect. Some of the simplicity is apparently the result of the printing process; a “behind-the-curtain” peek is offered in one of the stories, where the alignment crosses have been left on-page. From that, it is easy to see how tricky it would be to do anything too intricate unless it were in monochrome – and doing that would not be playing to the book’s strengths.

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These aren’t thrilling tales; Kessler certainly knows which side of the art/commerce divide he wants to come down on, and isn’t afraid of being opaque. Some of the pieces feel like they exist as little more than a frame to hang the artwork from (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; the one-pager “Kawanishi’s Greenhouse” is the best-looking single-page in the book), but others succeed in being deeper. The best two, the aforementioned collaboration with Reuben Mwaura and an extremely formalist piece about deaths from a prairie fire, use Kessler’s style, colouring and, yes, the risograph printing to tell a story which oughtn’t be told any other way.

Windowpane is a difficult book, and almost certainly unsuitable as someone’s first – or even tenth – comic. But put a little bit of effort into it, and it gives back a lot more.

Windowpane is published by Breakdown Press, £7.00 plus shipping.

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