Baltic Comics Magazine #5 – After Snowfall
Enough of all those stupid Various pages on this site. From now on everybody gets their own page! This is a collection of stories from 18 different artists (about half from Latvia, the rest from Germany, Sweden, Russia, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, and Lithuania), all dealing with stories set, obviously, after snowfall. These stories go all over the place, as stories from every good anthology should do, with all sorts of artistic styles. There’s Kolbeinn Karlsson telling the story of Dracula’s last days on earth (and how he bit a woman just so he wouldn’t be alone when he died), Ruta Briede with a silent piece about a lonely man in a snowglobe, Ines Christine Geisser showing the tragic consequences of stealing giant blocks of ice from a frozen lake, Hironori Kikuchi (the sampled piece) with a deceptively adorable story about stuffed animals and a human noticing that pieces of their story haven’t had the snow filled in, Yoshi cluing us all in as to how to know which way to dig if you’re trapped in an avalanche, Johan Klungel shows a suicide that didn’t work exactly as intended, Ernests Klavins with a brilliant Lord of the Rings parody where the snow is very useful in tracking the invisible Gollum, and Aisha Franz has a great piece about how an underground child (Americans, think Cabbage Patch Kids) comes up a little too early. That’s roughly half of the people involved, anyway, and just about everything in here has something to recommend it. About 2/3 of this is in color, and I mean vibrant, strong colors. All that and this is still only a measly $6 (U.S., cheaper with places with a functioning economy), while still being the size of a mini comic (although fatter). If you’re sick of the same old stuff, this is a perfect place to start expanding your horizons. $6