THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2024! In Hometown Harl Jones explores feelings that will, no doubt, be familiar to many. This minicomic short examines that odd sense of displacement that can occur when revisiting a familiar place that we are invested in and one that is steeped in memories. In this case it’s the home town of the title; inarguably the most resonant location for anyone reflecting on their past. Something Jones does in these pages with a haunting, lyrical quality.
It’s is an ode to past self, an affirmation of Thomas Wolfe’s oft paraphrased words, and a visually arresting piece of psychogeographical meditation. A young woman walks through the streets depicted in Hometown as familiar sensations come to the fore and memories are triggered. Childhood exploits resurface, vividly reborn as space, time and remembrance converge. And yet there’s also a sense of intangibility, of being one step removed from not just one’s past but one’s past self as well.
Jones approaches the subject with a quietly poetic turn of phrase, a kind of resigned weariness. There are gothic elements to the page layouts that enhance this feeling, with borders, motifs, twisting page layouts, and an early emphasis on the churchyard iconography as visual metaphor. It’s all oddly beautiful in its own strange, fatalistic way; borderline nihilism recast as alluring inevitability. Jones’ visual style here is at one once stripped back and sophisticated in page design, constantly shifting in sequential approach to ensure the reader stops, dwells on and digests the aching loneliness of each page.
Brooding and contemplative Hometown gets the highest of recommendations for those looking for shorter, complete work that really embraces the language of comics at Thought Bubble this year.
Harl Jones (W/A) • Self-published
Visit Harl Jones’s website here.
Review by Andy Oliver
Harl Jones will be at Table C9b in the Travelling Man Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2024 runs from November 11th-17th with the convention weekend taking place on the 16th-17th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2024 coverage so far in one place here.
Art by Rocío Arreola Mendoza
