The quiet man of Irish comix, Phil Barrett is perhaps one of the country’s most consistent creators, releasing at least one book a year and managing a regularly-updated blog. This, the 11th issue of his anthology title Matter is an enjoyable hodge podge of styles from the slice-of-life dramas of Mike Leigh to the mythic devilment of Flann O’Brien, all rendered in a six-panel structure that undersells Barrett’s knack for tackling big issues in small spaces.
Of the eight stories in this edition Barret manages manages to find tragedy in the comic and the comic in the tragic, only once lurching into full-blown melodrama. The opening piece, Smashment, is a fable about the fine balance between empowerment and loneliness when a young man famous for his superhuman strength finds himself an outcast when he takes a shine to a local lass. From there we get a whistlestop tour through cross cultural misunderstandings, psychic powers and what to do if you mistake a leprechaun for a…never mind.
The most intriguing of the stories, Ash Wednesday is a deceptively complex morality tale involving a burglar and a priest that hints at far darker undercurrents than a simple tale of material larceny. That Barrett can manage to balance text and subtext in only 12 panels is achievement enough to warrant each story get a second, or even a third, once-over to make sure nothing else has been missed.
Barrett has been known to experiment with levels of detail in his artwork in previous Matter collection but here he opts to keep it simple and let the stories take centre stage. This writer’s new personal favourite? The single image on the back cover of a woman all dressed up and going nowhere outside a wig shop. What comes across as filler on a first pass yields hidden depths through incidental details like the downturn of the lips, the anxious posture of a girl feeling the cold. In this sense it is classic Barrett: modest, unassuming and utterly compelling.
b/w, 16 pages, A5, W/A Philip Barrett www.blackshapes.com
