With the last few days of the Kickstarter campaign for her new book, Second Shift, winding down we’re taking the time to look at Kit Anderson’s first Avery Hill book Safer Places today at BF. A collection of comics shorts that often find the profound in the smaller moments of life, it’s also a book that mixes approaches and styles while emphasising the magical and the strange in the everyday.
Safer Places consists of around twenty short stories, some of which are linked, with one in particular, ‘Quest’ (below) featuring a wandering wizard, weaving through the rest in five chapters. It’s a compilation of quietly strange tales. A dreamlike basement of memories is explored; a sleep app takes us on an existential journey; a PC desktop background becomes a portal to another plane of being; and an entire town of living people is found existing at the bottom of a lake.
What makes these offerings so extra eerie is the quiet way in which they are delivered. Anderson works without brash ostentation, letting the weirdness speak for itself; surreal and bizarre, and yet in tone almost incongruously subdued as well. In ‘Weeds’ (below) a young woman finds a flower growing out of her face as she realises she is slowly transforming into something plant-like. Anderson’s black and white visuals depict this floral infection as an intruder all the more effectively for its red petals slowly infiltrating each page with an escalating rapidity, moving in from the outsides of panels with a meta flourish. As with much of the material here the reader can find their own metaphor or allegory in ‘Weeds’ work or simply enjoy it on an unsettling surface level.
In the three different ‘Sleep Tape’ stories Anderson plays with the form to portray different states of consciousness, as separate characters move in and out of contrasting mindscapes, some of which are abstract, some perspective-altering, and some acting to underline a contrast between perception and reality. Senses of belonging or of finding comfort in environment abound. Often in remarkably different ways, as in the aforementioned ‘Wallpaper’ where silent storytelling allows its protagonist to find solace in a digital haven, or the understated ‘Whump’ with its long, landscape-style panels showing a chance meeting between two strangers, both embracing the comfort of the natural world.
Collections like this can feel disjointed and patchy and yet, despite the often disparate presentational approaches here, the stories in Safer Places complement and re-enforce each other both thematically and in tone. Avery Hill, as we know, are at the forefront of bringing newer voices to expanded readerships. If you’re thinking of checking out Safer Places you couldn’t go far wrong in also investigating that Second Shift Kickstarter too.
Kit Anderson (W/A) • Avery Hill Publishing, £14.99
Back the Kickstarter for Second Shift here
Review by Andy Oliver
