Everything by Geoff Grogan
Mixed media comic books, it is not as surprising as it might sound, Ashley Wood has done a lot of mixed media comic style books through the years. It is nice to see someone else following along in the same style and vein as Ashley, so immediately a comic book like this is going to grab my attention. Mixed media comics are not for everyone, you like it or you do not. I have found that people are equally as passionate or as angry with Ashley Wood for his work, as they probably will be about Fandancer by Geoff Grogan. But independent comic books should push the medium, and this one surprisingly does very well at not only pushing the medium, but making you think about comic books in a whole new way. This is still sequential, but looks and feels at times like street art.
Fandancer is the story of a nameless super woman who makes a quick trip to hell to get back something that was stolen. The brilliant part of the story is that you have no idea why she is going there to get something, only that it was stolen. This is a book with few if any labels, the heroine is unnamed, the stolen item is unnamed, you don’t really know why she is doing this, only that she is. As a reader, you are following along with some very cool visual and graphical effects that only mixed media can bring about. This is not the kind of comic you are going to find in your every day local comic book store, you would be lucky to find it in a university book store, fortunately it is on Graphicly, otherwise it probably would have been buried in obscurity.
The only real drawback to the book is that it has been barely marketed. The Facebook fan page looks abandoned, the video has only been watched 70 times, there are no reviews, it looks like we are the only ones who found out about it, and that was because of graphicly. Books like this deserve to be purchased because they turn what is a comic book on its head. Yes there is the occasional boob shot, but nothing that would rate this comic more than Mature Audiences. It is sad to see a good work like this abandoned, lost in the flush of the weekly big two comic book releases, or that it is not available to pick up in hard copy.
I would rate this comic book five out of five stars, it pushes the envelope, is novel and unique. Almost no context in which to hang anything on, but still effectively tells a story. It should be available in stores, so if anyone knows where to get a hard copy, I want this one for my own comic book library.
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