Amy and Jordan

Rating:
Summary: Averting the eyes is important, but just as impossible
Review: A self-taught outsider in the sequential arts realm, Mark Beyer's graphical work has been notorious for appearing in free urban weeklies from the late 1980s to early 1990s. His best known work consists of a surreal, subterranean-inspired comic strip series. Collected for the first time (outside of crumbling newspaper clippings stashed in a shoebox in some dark hiding place), Beyer's quasi-popular "Amy & Jordan" strip has finally made it to store shelves, in black-and-white hardcover format. Indeed, while the tome is a bleak, gothic compilation which almost certainly isn't for everyone, it is (at its nicest) morbidly compelling.

Each strip is a study in urban alienation, with no oasis for Jordan or his sadistically-inclined roommate Amy throughout. The dead-end lives of the two protagonists continue unabated as the outside world invades and attacks them from the inside, page after agonizing page. Dealing with such light-hearted and universal subjects as premature death, prolonged starvation and mortal childhood illness, Beyer pries open every dismal, dry-rotted cask of the imagination, slyly smirking the whole while. The reader becomes a part of the assault, eyes incapable of averting, all the while whimpering, "Please... no more!"

And no two Amy & Jordan strips are alike, thanks to Beyer's unique paneling techniques. Every strip features its own style of frame, as if each panel were a piece of art interdependent of the other, yet isolated from all other strips within the book.

For fans who like their independent comic strips macabre (such as James Kochalka's now defunct Deadbear: Circus Detective) Amy & Jordan is the perfect compliment.