Page 45 Review by Stephen
Narrative Innovation Alert!!!
The most massive round of applause to Zawadzki for the frankly ASTONISHING inspiration, imagination, lateral thinking and communicative skill which he has brought to bear on Camp's highly unusual narrative requirements and techniques... particularly during (but not limited to) the fourth instalment where time accelerates so fast that life speeds terrifyingly past our bewildered, helpless protagonist and everyone and every thing totally gets away from him.
"Time flies. One minute you're a kid in High School... The next you're sleeping through your college graduation." So much, so cliché, but what if it really was all in one minute flat?
I cannot even begin to tell you how eye-widening clever that story is. It wouldn't work in prose (nor film, for that matter), and without Zawadski's linking devices (his visual conflations etc) so artfully, communicatively coloured by Jordie Belaire it wouldn't work so well in comics, either.
Same goes for the raptor/abattoir blues of the second story, dashing backwards and forwards through time.
The fifth is a question of history repeating itself, while the middle instalment - which is where I first truly sat up and took notice - concerns one specific town on two almost identical planet earths. We follow their paths in parallel, one but a little further ahead than the other towards their (our) inevitable death by climate catastrophe until, on the eve of desperation, the population of the definitely doomed town finds a doorway to the one where a little hope yet lingers.
What happens next? Oh, Sapiens... Possibly the most inaccurately named species of all time.
The only reason this wasn't Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month is the first issue's launch of a sub-plot, which will be fun for some, sure, but without which four of these short stories would have stood alone in pristine perfection,, so a dark sky of deafening thunderclaps to Deniz Camp as well. This what we want: ideas!
