Sequential Vacation #1, by Sar Shahar. Shahar is from Los Angeles. This silent comic was a compelling read and the artist shows a great deal of promise. The comic centers around repetition and grids, as it follows a window cashier at a fast-food restaurant through his life. The book starts with nine straight panels of the world outside his window: different faces from different cars who all want the same thing. We then follow the character to a club, where he waits in line (lines and waiting are also repeating motifs in the comic) to get in, but is slump-shouldered and miserable until a young woman wearing huge sunglasses takes him by the hand and they wind up sleeping together. For him, it's a transformative experience. For her, it's another day, a fact hammered home when she drives through his line at the fast-food joint. She's not just another face in the window for him, but she very much views him as an "object-at-hand", a person who does a job. There's evidence that him being a fast-food worker turns her off, given that she seems to lead an idly rich life (going to a matinee of the hilarious named movie "Motorcycle Vs Helicopter II" while he's working, perhaps breaking a date they had set up earlier to see the film at night). When he meets a new girl who happens to start working at his story who looks a bit like her, it all seems like fate will break his way--until she tragically is killed and he has to clean up the mess. (That bit of commentary on the dehumanization of minimum wage workers was especially affecting.) He winds up with another lookalike in the end, but it's unclear what will come of it. Unlike the other comics in this survey, this story feels closely tied to the locale of the author. The city feels like LA, with its car culture, emphasis on grids and night life. The repeating visual motifs are clever and striking, and the stark use of black & white reminds me a bit of what Robert Sergel does in Eschew. Shahar is not as clean a draftsman as Sergel, especially in terms of character design, but the page composition shows an artist who clearly thinks a lot about images and how they carry a narrative. I'm eager to see Shahar's next comic.
-http://highlowcomics.blogspot.com/2011/09/minis-from-across-usa.html
11/7/2020
