{"id":13898,"date":"2010-05-02T10:57:37","date_gmt":"2010-05-02T15:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=13898"},"modified":"2010-07-22T22:45:23","modified_gmt":"2010-07-23T03:45:23","slug":"moynihan-jesse-the-backwards-folding-mirror-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=13898","title":{"rendered":"Moynihan, Jesse &#8211; The Backwards Folding Mirror #2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Website<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/backwards21.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"backwards21\" src=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/backwards21.jpg\" alt=\"backwards21\" width=\"443\" height=\"570\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Backwards Folding Mirror #2<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If I had an actual list of people I&#8217;ve heard of but haven&#8217;t read,  Jesse Moynihan would be at the top of it.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s a name that has been  floating around for years, but as I mostly go by books I get in the mail  or at conventions these days, I haven&#8217;t really had a chance to see his  stuff.\u00c2\u00a0 This comic is from 2005 (it&#8217;s 3\/28\/09 right now), but Jesse&#8217;s  website does mention that this is a bi-monthly book.\u00c2\u00a0 Sorry, I figured  out that that was rarely true many years ago, and judging from his  website and wandering around the internet this is the last issue of this  series.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s an imprecise way to judge, granted, so a bit more  digging seems to show that he&#8217;s at least done plenty of other images,  although I can&#8217;t seem to find any sort of a store that has a definitive  pile of his comics.\u00c2\u00a0 Note to cartoonists: make it a bit easier to find  your stuff, as I&#8217;m usually lazier than I am today.\u00c2\u00a0 Regardless, it&#8217;s  easy enough to find this issue to buy, so I&#8217;ll shut up about it  already.\u00c2\u00a0 What&#8217;s it about?\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s a dreamy, disjointed thing, and I mean  that only in the best possible sense.\u00c2\u00a0 Things start off with a garden  gnome the size of a regular human (or so) who finds his friend, the Sad  Pony, suffering after breaking its leg.\u00c2\u00a0 The gnome is asked to put the  pony out of its misery, but upon asking another creature for help the  gnome ends up watching the Sad Pony being carried away through the sky  by&#8230; himself.\u00c2\u00a0 Following this is a mostly subjective quest to find the  pony involving an angry elephant, a dark secret, an expanding and  contracting keyhole and some serious moral ambiguity.\u00c2\u00a0 The second story  is another half-awake, half-asleep kind of thing, dealing with the same  gnome sleeping with his girlfriend.\u00c2\u00a0 The gnome has a serious out-of-body  experience, but calling out to his girlfriend pulls him back to reality  and ruins the whole thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally there&#8217;s another story about the  girlfriend, as she wakes up and wanders into a lake to confront a hairy  bird-like creature.\u00c2\u00a0 Said creature pokes a hole in her head, which  eventually leads all the way back to the Sad Pony, as the gnome enjoys  getting to use the entire bed.\u00c2\u00a0 There are layers and layers past what  I&#8217;m conveying here, obviously, but the fun in these comics is figuring  them out for yourself, or making your own reality with it.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s  gorgeous, haunting in all the right places and occasionally even  uplifting.\u00c2\u00a0 I also got the impression that the secret of the universe  was in here somewhere, if I could just dig a little deeper&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/backwards22.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"backwards22\" src=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/backwards22.jpg\" alt=\"backwards22\" width=\"590\" height=\"757\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Website The Backwards Folding Mirror #2 If I had an actual list of people I&#8217;ve heard of but haven&#8217;t read, Jesse Moynihan would be at the top of it.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s a name that has been floating around for years, but as I mostly go by books I get in the mail or at conventions these [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3869,1759],"class_list":["post-13898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-jesse-moynihan","tag-the-backwards-folding-mirror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13898"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13900,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898\/revisions\/13900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}