On Komix

Two paragraphs from my review of Coching's El Indio:

"Despite its employing of words and pictures for narrative purposes, komix is a medium with mechanisms that are closer to music and poetry than painting and prose: its elements' awareness of each other in their placement on the page, all working in synch to evoke a certain reaction, to tell a certain story, to make the characters move from one action to the other, one turn hingeing on the one preceding it and at the same time anticipating the one next to it, all laid out as a linear track of images albeit also happening all at once - all the words and pictures are on page, your eyes providing the machine to make them "move" - is a process that operates more on patterns and rhythms - movement and closure: panel one opens, panel two closes - than the more linear (prose) or static (painting) media that constitute its parts that make up its whole.

"It's hard not to look at Margarita's page-38-and-39 dance sequence without seeing her actually dancing her seduction dance with Fernando, without hearing busy percussive beats of brass and strings with her arms' every snap and pose - and it's because every movement logically follows the one before it and anticipates the ones next to it, like a particularly skillful nylon string guitar solo, or a really smoothly executed enjambment - it wouldn't have been anything else but what and how the artist laid it on the page."

And I, of course, stand by this claim.