I was writing something nice about the webcomic "Hebi no Hana" when LiveJournal ate my post. Hence my move here.

And my old journal can be found here.

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Lately, I've been digging the webcomic "Hebi no Hana", by Rami Efal of the Act-I-Vate collective (a comic book artist collective similar in spirit to KaBLOW!). What is striking about "Hebi no Hana" is Efal's use of line to convey the narrative through shift of mood and rhythm (which brings us back to the conversation on Eric's blog about line in experimental poetry, music and painting, although Effal is not as experimental).

The simpler lines seems to convey an ethereal feeling in the panel. Also, those panels are stripped to their essentials, in the manner of ukyo-e, further reinforcing their dreamlike features. Simultaneously, the thinner lines add speed to the image, as they are the ones that convey the action.

The other panels seem to combine a mixing of Japanese manga style with its use of Zipatone for shading (although I've recently seen this used in Ultimate Extinction, by Warren Ellis and Brandon Peterson) and a Western European influence, reminiscent of Hugo Pratt's work in Corto Maltese. I'm not sure what this more detailed/realistic technique conveys. Concreteness? But the amount of lines and their thickness also slow down the succession of panels, which could indicate that a greater amount of time has passed between the dream sequences.

The story is for the most part wordless, except for a few onomatopeia in both Japanese katakana (the syllabary system used to write onomatopeia and most foreign words) and Roman characters. There is actually a disconnect between how sound is portrayed in both symbolic system, the Japanese onomatopeia actually reading "pantsu" (which is also the Japanese way of saying "pants"). "Thud" on the other hand is translated into "dosa."

And this is where I was supposed to write about the portrayal of Otherness, since it seems to be in the Zeitgeist, but I forgot what I wanted to say after LiveJournal ate my entry.