Arpad Okay, Doom Rocket:
“Fox employs chaotic tessellation that marries biological diagrams with gothic stationery. The sweeping curves of Fox’s lines, the high-relief black and white, and the fairy tale macabre all strongly evoke Aubrey Beardsley. His bookplates in particular, the blossoms that would edge pages, the swans hiding in the reeds on his endpapers.
Prokaryote Season also displaces words among the plates. Blocks of text — long passages — accompany the images rather than exist within them. It’s deliberate, like Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn (though Baker has re-released it contemporarily, re-edited and ballooned, undoing his original dialog separation choice) or Joe Sacco’s expository chains dividing the layouts in Palestine. The reader must do the work of reconciling text and image, like a film with subtitles. It makes the spoken lines that appear in speech bubbles feel quite distinct tonally from the segregated inner thought blocks.
You get a play, with lines being delivered back and forth, but also a text-based depth of character revelation that won’t work on stage. One that typically doesn’t work for comics, either. Think of all the time that went into art like this to make it bloom. Not only comics but maturation as a medium. The books that look this way were developed ages ago, in another epoch. How is it that contradiction can reside so comfortably with satisfaction? Of course, Prokaryote Season is magic. Just look at it.”
Read the full review on Doom Rocket’s website here!
