Spiral And Other Stories

Description

A delicate, dreamlike, and lushly detailed comics collection by a contemporary artist whose work explores the enmeshment of the human and non-human worlds.

For years, Aidan Koch’s comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, reimagining what a comic can look like and how it can tell a story. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. Spiral and Other Stories is a triumph of that continuing process.

Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit. Characters yearn for each other, even as they’re pulled toward different lives. Rivers dance together, then diverge as they make their way to the sea.

With an accompanying essay by the author and critic Nicole Rudick, who explores Koch’s craft and her move into environmentally focused comics, Spiral and Other Stories is a showcase of Koch’s mastery of comics as a medium that can contain astonishing forms and offer new kinds of storytelling for our uncertain times.

About the Author

Gary Panter is a highly influential comics artist, painter, illustrator, and designer. He helped shape the visual identity of the 1970s punk scene in Los Angeles and was a key contributor to Raw magazine in the 1980s. A three-time Emmy winner for his set designs for Pee-wee's Playhouse, he received the Chrysler Award for Design Excellence in 2000 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2014.

Ed Ruscha is one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. Renowned for his experimentations with text and image and the repurposing of graphic design elements in his art, he lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Nicole Rudick is a critic and editor. She has written widely on art, literature, and comics for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade and edited two issues of the magazine as well as The Writer's Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from "The Paris Review" Interviews.