Ochre Ellipse #3
by Jonas Madden-Connor
Family Style

It’s difficult to say something new about the simplicity and preciousness of youth, but in Ochre Ellipse #3, I believe Jonas Madden-Connor has done it.

Childhood is such a primitive, potent time in a person’s life; it’s no wonder that memories from that time eventually become lore.  In the hands of a capable storyteller, otherwise common occurrences like bullying become rich, comedic, thought-provoking tales that offer a “new” perspective on growing up.

But that’s not what I mean when I say that Madden-Connor’s latest mini-comic offers unique take on youth.  What I mean to say is that, while most authors weave wisdom into chaos, they are still showing us a familiar thing that, ultimately, we relate to because those things have happened to us.  Most stories operate on the need for audience projection — people seeing themselves in the work, empathizing and liking it — but this is a device that Ochre Ellipse #3 cleverly sidesteps.  It finds other interesting ways of making its point about youth, memory and nostalgia.

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Isotope Award 2009 from Sarah Morean on Vimeo.

I’ve often thought of independent comics as the great social equalizer. By this I mean that no indie cartoonist or fan walking alone into a room full of similar stock should be able to leave without a friend. My estimation of indie comics, it seems, was too naive. See, until last weekend, I’d never been further west than Denver. The indie shows I’d seen were packed with internet acquaintances, kind artists recalling my fan letters, and other Midwesterners. In other words, people that I already knew. I’d been biased, for sure.

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Ochre Ellipse #2
By Jonas Madden-Connon
Family Style

Start with something simple: unrequited love. A cashier at a supermarket–Mercet. She’s small and full-bodied and rosy-cheeked. She works the checkout line Mondays through Thursdays and on Saturday afternoons. Our momentary protagonist is, to say the least, enamored. He meanders through the supermarket, tossing groceries into his basket that he never plans on purchasing, to avoiding looking suspicious. It’s a basic conceit–one sure to be incredibly familiar to anyone who has read their share of indie books.

For Jonas Madden-Connor, however, this base plotline feels like more of a sandbox, a safe environment in which to try out a multitude of ideas, something that Ochre Ellipse is clearly not lacking, a point made abundantly clear by turning to nearly any of the book’s 29 CD booklet-sized pages. Madden-Connor’s scenes employ a unique sense of depth, a camera trained 3/4 overhead, on a plane to which even his character’s speech bubbles adhere. The panels that retain them, while present on nearly ever page, dissolve or shift, a friendly reminder that, while the artist is still content to use them as a tool with which to tell his story, they are simply that–a means to an end, rather than a necessity. Objects on the store’s shelves are also fodder for the story, adapting their text to form streams of thoughts that project our unrequited narrator’s inner-monologue.

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