And then there's Amanda Vähämäki, whose book Campo di Babá (The Bun Field)is one of Canicola's first stand-alone efforts.
I'm guessing Amanda is Finnish and either lives in Italy or maybe hooked up with the Italians via correspondence [February 07 update: she is indeed Finnish but she lived in Bologna for six years--M], but the book is in Italian with English "subtitles." This is Canicola's globalist innovation and I think it's pretty clever: the English translation appears at the bottom of each page. It's not an ideal solution but it's better than tipping in a sheet of paper with the entire script translated, and Canicola utilizes it in their anthology as well.
Campo di Babá is a meandering, dreamy narrative drawn in a warm and sketchy pencil style full of visible corrections and smudges. The 54-page comic follows a young tomboy as she wakes from a nightmare and embarks on a strange kind of low-key odyssey full of talking animals, barren landscapes, and a sense of foreboding--even of judgement--that seems to hover nearby her wherever she goes.
It's a cliché to invoke David Lynch when talking about weird and creepy dream narratives, but Campo di Babá shares with his recent films a beguiling sense that meaning is just beyond your grasp, and, more to the point, the narrative has a formal complexity--including a circular ending that is easy to miss on the first read--that I found very satisfying.
Look for more presence of Canicola in the US soon, I know they are trying to get US distribution of their work and I am trying to convince them to come to the MoCCA Art Festival this summer. Keep an eye out. Read more...
