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In an effort to maintain some continuity between these little(?) post introductions, I’ll note that the same Dark Fantasy Productions I mentioned last week had at one point planned to publish the work of Croatian-born Danijel Zezelj, who at that point had just recently arrived in the United States. Specifically, they were going to release an American edition of his 1995 book Rex, a crime comic about a hulking ex-cop smashing out of prison to exact revenge on the people that ruined his life. The material was finally released in a North American edition in 2008 by Optimum Wound Comics, which also posted it online; there’s some interesting mixed media stuff going on with some pages, and an extended coda that seeks to hoist the content entirely into some oddball poetry space.

Zezelj had developed a lot since then; the image above is from one of my favorite recent finds, the artist’s 2004 short comics collection Caballo, published in English by Petikat, the art workshop he co-founded. The image above is from Reflex – Marinara, one of five segments in the book named after an earlier project, 2003’s graphic novel and live performance piece Reflex. These shorts are wordless, typically exercising some interest in comics pacing, or perspective; as seen above, the readers perspective seems to zoom in incredibly close to Zezelj’s representational slashes of image, abstracting the scene until briefly backing away to reveal a different image, one apparently suggested by the preceding abstract image. This is the sequence, perhaps improvisatory, but keenly unified: scenes flickering in and out of solidity.

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