There’s something undeniably interesting about how sometimes the Colossive Press Colossive Cartographies zines benefit from the added context on the Colossive site. If you do this the right way around and read the comic/zine first before referring back to its listing online it serves to really make you consider how you interacted with the narrative originally, and how that changed on learning more about creative intent.
Take Colossive Cartographies #62 and artist and printmaker Harriet Merry’s ‘The School Run’, for example. On a first read we are drawn into a short piece of sequential art full of starkly beautiful imagery that seems to seek to capture a daily family ritual that is both everyday and important. A world within the vehicle moving through the one outside, with a detached but not inconsequential interactivity.
Revisiting with the input of the zine’s summary we see other factors at play. The car/school run as family bonding time or even conflict; the focus of shared experience within a discrete environment; a time to connect or to contemplate. Merry’s printmaking practice and considerations, as also detailed there, add an extra environmental edge to the project, balancing guilt about contributing to the environmental crisis with practice that attempts to be as friendly to it as possible. As ever, one of the greatest strengths of the Colossive Cartographies series is how they make us think about and consider the intricacies of our relationship with the page.
Harriet Merry (W/A) • Colossive Press, £2.00
Review by Andy Oliver
