The Comics Journal nov 2006

I can't figure out which one is his day job, but aside from self-publishing this comic, Jesse Moynihan also plays guitar and violin with Philadelphia band Make A Rising. These two facets of Moynihan's artistic career look like backwards-folding-mirror images of one another in their common urge to experimental weirdness tempered by a pleasantly accessible and entertaining approach. In the second issue of his comic book, Moynihan presents four pleasantly strange pieces - a long untitled story, the shorter strips "Mystery Beast" and "OBE," and a final longer story, "experience" - in his idiosynchratic yet straightforeward cartoon style.

Moynihan's cartoony art renders inteligible and expressive these weird series of events, dreams, nightmares, spontaneously combusting ponies and evolving mystery beasts. His facility with facial expression and fluid movement in moments of action counteracts the occasional stiffness of the figures in some of the more static panels. Perhaps Moynihan's musical skill manifests itself in the keen sense of visual rhythm that governs certain scenes of action or shifting perspective. At one point in "experience" the cone-hatted, nameless protagonist sees a vision through a hole in his girlfriend's head, one panel flowing smoothly into the next as we close in on his point of view. The panel-by-panel rhythm Moynihan employs lends potentially jarring, surreal moments like this the seamlessness of a vivid dream.

The stories develop by dream logic, like the wordless evolution of the mystery beast that makes up the strip "Mystery Beast." they proceed at a breathless pace: one situation, action, or utterance leading to another in a loose improvisational style. Dialogue hovers between absurdity and profundity, while moment by moment allegorical fable, surreal gag-strip humor and recognizable human experience continually give way to one another.

While it may sound a bit messy or rough around the edges, the overall result, while initially perplexing, is actually quite coherent. Odd elements from the first untitled story in this issue - the devil, the talking pony, the fat, winged, advice-giving quadrupeds - reappear in one form or another in the final piece, turning what could be absurd, surreal non sequiturs into absurd, surreal recurring motifs. These recurrences are accompanied by visual shymes, such as that between the wallpaper patterns in the two longer stories or the forest and ocean settings. From all of this a distinct imaginative world emerges, a dreamy bedtime world of shifting forms and irrational associations - a world new and strange, but not entirely alien.

Moynihan states on his website that this comic is in large part the result of a developing confidence with narrative and the comic-book form. His announcement of a forthcoming Backwards Folding Mirror graphic novel signals that this artistic maturation will continue. The fun, intriguing short works in this issue show that Moynihan has all of the elements of his cartooning in place and prepared to produce something even more ambitious.

-Stephen Hirsch