Ellsworth, Theo – Birthday

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Birthday

This is the highest compliment I can give: Theo Ellsworth is gradually becoming the Jim Woodring for this generation. Not that the current Jim Woodring is out of steam, and Theo (or any other human) still has some work to do before fully capturing that mantle, but he’s well on his way. If you’ve read Theo’s work in the past, you can agree or disagree, but at the very least you should be able to see where I’m coming from. This is also the first time (that I know of) where Theo’s comic is in full color, and it’s as glorious and disturbing as you would imagine. This is the part where I try to describe the comic, and on that count I am going to fail miserably, with the parts I get right mostly coming from the description on the back of the book. This is the story of a very nervous young man right before his “Inner-Space Birth Ritual.” See, I took that right from the description, as I had very little idea of what was happening before reading that. Anyway, keep an eye on the backgrounds throughout your reading of this comic, as there are little touches and/or creatures all over the place. Anyway, our hero finally gets a globe placed onto his head and the ritual begins. culminating in a final page that makes total sense in context, but try showing that to anybody as a single image. Anyway, it’s about rebirth, resistance to change, peer pressure, and I’m just making stuff up now. It’s a visual adventure through the mind of this young man as he undergoes an intense metamorphosis, how about that? It’s a fantastic book, with none of those pesky words cluttering things up, and it’s well worth your time to hunt it down.

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Posted on October 5, 2015, in Reviews and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Leave a Comment.

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