
It takes some real guts to set your comic 100 years after the fall of an imaginary civilization readers aren’t familiar with in the first place — and to give said comic a title composed of made-up words — but if there’s one thing you can’t say about Alexander Laird, it’s that he’s a cartoonist lacking in either ambition or confidence. And that confidence and ambition carries over into every aspect of his new self-published number, Burg Land 1 – Sleemore Gank,
Indeed, from its masterful use of riso printing to its slick publication design (including a deliberately tor-out page that, bet you anything, was fully drawn regardless) to its immersive narrative to its idiosyncratic, colored-pencil art to its thick supplemental insert written entirely in a coded alien language invented by the artist that, if you wish, you can take the time to decipher fully, this is clearly and obviously a work that has been executed in exact accordance with its initial conceptualization. It’s fucking breathtaking across the board, and my hat is off to Laird for this, no exaggeration or hyperbole, monumental achievement.

Okay, sure, we’ve got some allegorical “cautionary tale” stuff going on here, but Laird is in no way heavy-handed about it — the overall tone and temperament of his work is as light and deft as the even-weight line of his drawings and the delicacy of his rich color scheme. The aesthetic values of this comic are well and truly inseparable from its narrative values, which means of course that the inverse is also true. I yammer on at great length on this site about so-called auteur comics, well, this is the apex and perhaps even apotheosis of that term — it simply doesn’t get any more auteur than this, to the point that some new sort of designation, one that encompasses every aspect aspect of a comic’s production both creatively and technically, may be required. Don’t ask me what that would be, but as I hold this comic in my hands I am fully and keenly aware that it’s one of those things , like John Pham’s Epoxy, that take the idea of full artistic control from start to finish to unprecedented heights.


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Burg Land 1 – Sleemore Gank is available for $17.00 directly from Alexander Laird at https://sensitiveathletes.bigcartel.com/product/sleemor-gank-burg-land-1
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