Another of Canadian publisher Conundrum Press’s ‘Conundrum 25’ celebratory series of graphic shorts, Billy Mavreas’s Next Time Around sits somewhere on the border between graphic medicine and graphic poetry. We’ve previously reviewed some of the other entries in Conundrum’s 25th anniversary imprint at Broken Frontier, including Obom’s The Man Who Walked through Walls and Elisabeth Belliveau’s Condo Lady. It’s an eclectic range of diverse styles and subject matter that has admirably communicated the form’s versatility, and its planned eventual collection as a box set is certainly something to anticipate.
In the 60-plus pages of Next Time Around, Mavreas gives us a first person account of new beginnings that is at least presumably autobiographical in origin. Its introduction, by a near-silhouetted version of the protagonist as a disembodied head considering the nature of where our personal stories begin, captures the required sense of introspection with a meta sense of visual minimalism.
From here Mavreas retells the events of a near-death experience in mostly one-panel pages that use a striking black and white form of impressionism to capture the experience a life-changing accident and its consequences. We experience the immediacy of impact and injury before a hazy, dreamlike sequence takes us on a spiritual journey that will completely change our central character’s outlook on his life and world, as he discovers where his story begins (or possibly restarts).
I have never been keen on the term “deceptively simple”, viewing it as a lazy reviewer fallback, but there’s something to be said for its application here. What Mavreas achieves in a book that often uses stark and stripped back imagery is a story of rebirth, renewal and re-evaluation of life that is deeply profound precisely because it is presented with such clarity and lack of fanfare. Next Time Around is a thoughtful and intimate comics short that, if you’re unaware of the work of Billy Mavreas, will act as a certain catalyst for further investigation.
Billy Mavreas (W/A) • Conundrum Press, $10.00
Review by Andy Oliver
Thanks for the thoughtful review, Andy