JULIACKS   PRESS !

SWELL PART ONE:

"This story of a young woman who attempts to come to terms with the death of her sister is an early candidate for minicomic of the year for 2008. There's an intensity to her art that draws a reader into each panel and doesn't let go. There's a stream-of-consciousness quality to the narrative that is perfectly integrated into Juliacks' idiosyncratic composition. There's one masterful page where the protagonist, Emmeline, recalls a bitter fight with her now-dead sister Lucy where Lucy smashed some eggs that Emmeline had decorated with her friends. There are decorative touches framing the page in the form of little eggs, and the panels are framed so as to form an egg. Juliacks changes her approach to a page at a frequently breakneck pace--going from a number of tiny panels in a row to huge splash pages.

This comic is one of the best explorations of memory and its connection to emotion that I've ever read. That stream-of-consciousness style, where Emmeline is constantly dipping into her memories as a way of trying to process Lucy's death, is perfectly meshed with her lettering. The entire package depicts emotion in an intuitive manner that a reader can instantly grasp without being hammered on the head. The size of the panels, the size of the lettering, and the greater abstraction of images all are ways Juliacks modulates emotion. Juliacks has greatly improved the control she has over her line and figures, adding greater clarity to her work. Juliacks is an especially exciting talent because it's hard to compare her to any other particular artist. Dash Shaw is the closest comparison I can make in terms of both the formal risks that they take and their subject matter, but Juliacks goes in some very different directions."

Robert Clough http://www.sequart.com/columns/?column=2090 February 17, 2008

"This is impressive, dense stuff, its narrative bounding around in time -- back and forth, then indistinctly forward, page-by-page -- and shifting in and out of a primary character's consciousness, events sometimes observed and sometimes felt....Generally, it's the story of young Emmeline, whose sister Lucy dies while she's away at university. In execution, it's an account of reminisce and supposition swirling with grief, as time continues to stagger indistinctly forward. Juliacks works in mark-heavy, sometimes geometrically arranged displays that recall Mark Beyer's Amy and Jordan strips, albeit far less controlled in tone and apt enough to shatter into tiny story bits that moment-to-moment reading occasionally becomes a challenge. Still, there's a firm grasp of pace behind this, long horizontal strips of narrative on one page giving way on the next to those twisted roots of sadness as (barely) seen above. The artist's visual world deliberately struggles to pull itself into a restrained schema as its main character tries to set her emotional state in order, but it's all futile for part one. I'll like to see how it progresses."

http://joglikescomics.blogspot.com/ Joe "Jog" McCulloch July 6, 2008