Page 45 Review by Stephen
Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month December 2024
This left me grinning!
A quiet, contemplative and explorational piece with beautiful forms, thrilling vistas and immaculately fluid direction. It's the space that gives your mind the time and encouragement to breathe in, breathe out and absorb it all at leisure.
I love the visual contrast and physical contact between the protagonist's full, soft and, yes, womanly flesh and the pipeline's unyielding, monumental metal then the more intricate, crisp lattice of the towering oil rig's iron struts.
Of course she's going to climb it! Of course she is. But what then...?
I don't recall EVER before seeing these sudden switches to such intimate close-ups of the nose then, later, eye, and ear, and it works like a dream (which this is! lucid, meditative, or otherwise), repositioning the reader, momentarily, from outside spectator to fellow traveller.
Allllll of which would have been quite enough to commend itself as Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month - a new vision and voice to look out for alongside Lily Blakely's and Jess Kay's - but OIL FIELD additionally boasts a bona fide punchline which I never saw coming, and which will leave readers tantalising themselves, compulsively, with questions about what the young woman's fellow daydreamers may have been up to while she wandered her own mindscape.
And the punchline is so gradually, so cleverly introduced.
Still grinning.
