Andrew Luke's Comic Book #4
Posted on September 2, 2005
A mix culled from Andrew Luke's overflowing unpublished archives - his Henry Darger-like legacy - in some ways this publication is the paper equivalent of Miranda July's film, Me And You And Everyone We Know. Beneath its agreeably quirky, whimsy-strewn surface, bobs some universal truths, which, despite the oddness of under-realised subject matters, provides a curiously up- and off-beat entertainment with an accidentally personal quality.
TV trash, with value measured only in its ability to trigger glimpses of wasted youth, surfaces in the form of a trilogy of strips featuring a Luke-affected A-Team, Knight Rider and Incredible Hulk. Automan (?) puts in an appearance too, his car uttering the soon-to-be-immortal words, 'Walter, could you put your finger against my ram-pack for a minute'. The humour continues in the bizarre Unwanted (In Minor), a strip that echoes the reality-filled pressures of the LiveJournal logger's next entry as a character interrupts the enactment by friends of 'a secret story' in which he has no role. Guitar Festival Diary is an on-the-spot art diary covering two of the annual events, including gigs by John Martyn and Gordon Giltrap. It is here that Luke's relatively primitive drawing style suddenly transforms to a swarm of kinetic squiggles, evocatively capturing the live music vibe with synaesthesia-related accuracy – something of a revelation, this.
Also amongst the peculiar offerings is a controversial coffee in Coyle's Bar, an Eno Link Gallery, and a resistentialist lament for retired drawing pens, which further focuses this publication's forlorn hope that nostalgic objects might ease our sense of abandonment, and proves that the author himself is most likely outside the proverbial box, thinking of ways in. Let's not even go near Callista Flockhart And Beefburger!! ))<>((
A mix culled from Andrew Luke's overflowing unpublished archives - his Henry Darger-like legacy - in some ways this publication is the paper equivalent of Miranda July's film, Me And You And Everyone We Know. Beneath its agreeably quirky, whimsy-strewn surface, bobs some universal truths, which, despite the oddness of under-realised subject matters, provides a curiously up- and off-beat entertainment with an accidentally personal quality.
TV trash, with value measured only in its ability to trigger glimpses of wasted youth, surfaces in the form of a trilogy of strips featuring a Luke-affected A-Team, Knight Rider and Incredible Hulk. Automan (?) puts in an appearance too, his car uttering the soon-to-be-immortal words, 'Walter, could you put your finger against my ram-pack for a minute'. The humour continues in the bizarre Unwanted (In Minor), a strip that echoes the reality-filled pressures of the LiveJournal logger's next entry as a character interrupts the enactment by friends of 'a secret story' in which he has no role. Guitar Festival Diary is an on-the-spot art diary covering two of the annual events, including gigs by John Martyn and Gordon Giltrap. It is here that Luke's relatively primitive drawing style suddenly transforms to a swarm of kinetic squiggles, evocatively capturing the live music vibe with synaesthesia-related accuracy – something of a revelation, this.
Also amongst the peculiar offerings is a controversial coffee in Coyle's Bar, an Eno Link Gallery, and a resistentialist lament for retired drawing pens, which further focuses this publication's forlorn hope that nostalgic objects might ease our sense of abandonment, and proves that the author himself is most likely outside the proverbial box, thinking of ways in. Let's not even go near Callista Flockhart And Beefburger!! ))<>((
20 A5 pages - check availability at http://andyluke.livejournal.com