![]() But the effect is flat, the story's conceit stripping the comic of the urgency and intensity that fuels Albert's best work. ![]() ![]() The affect is breezy and bland, befitting its real-world equivalent. The text is typed out in caption boxes that are interspersed with standalone images simulating photographs taken by the travel writer. "On Venus" is presented as a travelogue, a guide for potential tourists to the alien communities on Earth's neighbor. The second story is more restrained, and worse off for it. Albert presents the autopsy as an event every bit as furtive and compulsory as the subject of any good anonymous online confession the art, which like all the work here is murkily inked and xeroxed as if on a copier with too much toner, only enhances the gotta-get-it-out-there feeling. Similarly, the prevailing feeling of the comic can be induced with just a few panels featuring the human protagonist: her head lolling back in a drunken torpor before the crash biting the knuckle of her index finger with a look of near-ecstatic nervousness on her face before she breaks out the box cutter to saw into the alien's body her finger and thumb gently but forcefully spreading the skin of the alien's forehead to reveal the clitoral bundle of nerves beneath. The first, "Alien Autopsy", appears to have been reverse engineered from a delusional plea the author found online - a message-board user claims to have conducted a crude autopsy on a cartilaginous humanoid alien with an advanced pineal gland before being anesthetized and robbed of the corpse by forces unknown, and asks for anyone who witnessed the UFO crash to come forward and corroborate these events. Indeed, each of the four short stories contained in this collection has its moment of greatest impact in panels where private emotions are made manifest in the actions of the body. In all four cases the theme is intimacy, invited or not. Alien biology is probed by a human performing an autopsy, explored by two aliens in a body-modification ritual with romantic undertones, inserted unexpectedly and forcibly into an unsuspecting human's more familiar body. Aliens visit Earth, humans visit other worlds, humans and aliens travel between worlds together. The former are presented in the fashion that has become Albert's trademark as an artist working with science-fictional imagery in an underground context - otherworldly and elfin, their ubiquitous third eyes a collective locus of mystical enlightenment, erotic fascination, and viscous physicality all at once. True, in a way, to its title, Lauren "Lala" Albert's Alien Invasion III has two primary concerns: aliens and invasiveness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |