By Simon Moreton
“As I’ve said before, this issue is going to be different from previous releases – it’s going to be a mass of scribbles and sketches, suburbs etched in EE pencils, prose hung loosely around, fully-formed half-arsed splashes of recollections about growing up in a town in which I no longer live. Is it going to be poetry? Sequential art? A big mess? Your guess is good as mine but it feels GOOD to be drawing all rough and ‘inaccurate’ and stuff.”
With previous issues of Smoo, Simon Moreton took us on a tour, both of his immediate surroundings and his own headspace, discussing both as we went, with a rangy, interesting, involving manner and some lovely, if naive and faltering artwork. Huge promise, that got better and better the more I saw of his work.
Here in issue 4 he’s refined his style, minimalism over expansion, fewer words, perhaps more carefully chosen, a deliberate decision by Moreton to condense, as you can glean from his words above. It’s become far more akin to the work in his Escapologist comic, with each page in this 18-page mini composed of just one or two borderless, un-pannelled images.
Concerned with an 11-year Moreton’s reluctant move to Marlow, each panel describes a moment, each image a memory, not necessarily of a place, but an idea, a collection of things….. sights, sounds, smells, just the way memory always works – a collated explosion of memory triggers.
But the careful, neat, control of the 11-year old’s memory breaks down, as teen years beckon, as disenchantment sets in, as Marlow becomes a teen, as his new town (newtown?) becomes just a place of boredom. Images become looser, less defined, as Moretons teen self searches the neighbourhood, mapping his life on its streets.
Another excellent comic, short, thoughtful (for both artist and reader), simple imagery laden with powerful, potential ideas.
I loved Smoo for the extra it gave me, the inclusion into Moreton’s head, the details of his life. I similarly loved The Escapologist for it’s beautiful abstraction, it’s thoughtforms drifting across the page. I enjoyed having both.
But now that Smoo is drifting more towards The Escapologist in style, even though it’s fascinating, beautiful and intriguing in its own ways, I can’t help but feel a pang of regret that there isn’t just a little more here, something to distinguish it from The Escapologist. I miss the conversational Moreton of earlier issues, and I miss his more expansive, page filling artwork. As enjoyable as this carefullly controlled, well thought out monologue is here, I miss the long chats we used to have, the older Moreton wandering, meandering, letting his thoughts out a little less guardedly.
But no matter. Moreton’s imagery, his simplicity, his white sense, his line; all go towards making interesting and ultimately thought-provoking comics, not in a huge, must be shocking way, but in the smaller sense. This is work to absorb, then stop, think, drift, ideas and memory kicking in, triggered from these lovely, lovely comics.
This edition of Smoo was from the small run Thought Bubble set, Moreton’s promsing a new, slightly expanded edition in 2012, available from his website.
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