Creator: Kit Anderson
Avery Hill Press, 2024
FOR ONE SMALL MOMENT we help an other live: in memory, in experience, in action, in desperate times when no one else cares. This is the primary theme in SAFER PLACES by creator Kit Anderson, a collection of twenty-one strips in two hundred pages. Stellar work most all, sometimes arresting, as in the title page for the story “Country Lane” where moonlight beams a shadow through a rail fence; and later in the same story, a small black panel in the night with the edge of a shadowed figure, a glimmering path ahead, and gold scribbled highlights, with the words, “So you move on.” Another theme.
The artwork is mostly sharp duo-tones, sometimes splashed in color, attractive in its diversions into something different, like the black panels walking through the night, or a symbolic draped window alone in the middle of a page, many floral patterns, and the whimsical “Whump” strip that goes into acrylic mode with elongated panels to capture the line of dune grass where the whump occurs.
The opening strip “Quest I” reoccurs up to “Quest V” like an emcee between acts, fully colored, trailing a forest dweller who sells mushrooms in town for bread, and is mistaken to be a wizard—or not. The duality of is /isn’t makes another theme, in this case comical through the theorizing of two gossiping merchants giving the words while we follow the silent wizard in his woody ways.
The second strip, “The Basement” is charming, and aroused similar memories of my own. Next, “Wonders of the Lost City” in sunburnt hues, mocks the allures of tourism, going to see some special place for a minute before moving on. A later strip “The World’s Biggest Ball of Twine” rehearses the same idea, at first enchanting, framing the holiday as mostly a journey with its own memorable views, but the journey of this poor, lonesome guy grows intentionally more sour, eating out of a can, roughing it in the woods, walking a ribbon of road without a ride, and then coming home to eat out of a can again: the point being, in my mind, why go somewhere to enrich your life, when you could better invest that time right here, learn how to cook maybe, and oh so many other things where action enlivens the dirge of poverty.
Getting away vies as the biggest theme in the book: away from this box of a room, away from mom, away from being a he or a she or anything in particular, glimmering in the face of nature, where all is forgiven and blessed. A good enough vision. If it eventually leads somewhere—or not.
[Editor’s note: a podcast from publisher Avery Hill Press about this title is available to listen to here – Signals From The Hill #56 – Kit Anderson on ‘Safer Places’ and some of her cultural influences! – Avery Hill Publishing and, following a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the title is available for sale here – Safer Places by Kit Anderson | Avery Hill Publishing ]