We finally got around to importing this spirited anthology from London, England. We now have the entire (so far) run of #1 - 6 on hand. There's a wealth of variety on hand in these issues, each of which is limited to a 1000 copy print run, only a fraction of which have managed to make it across the Atlantic. From Marc Bell and Ivan Brunetti to Xavier Robel and Ron Regé, Jr. and many, many others -- quite a few of whom will be new to you -- Sturgeon White Moss is a challenging ongoing forum for new comics work from Europe and North America.
Robel and Reumann, known collectively as Elvis Studio, have with Elvis Road produced a true one-of-a-kind item: a 9" x 264" (that's 22 feet!) comic book panel in which everything happens at once. When the entirety of the "story" is laid out in a single image and the mind has to pick and choose on its own, the reader can't help but recognize that the process of creating a story out of an assemblage of visual information is transformed. While, at least in theory, the entire spectacle as presented to the reader is intended to be seen as occurring in a single instant, the reader will almost certainly find him or herself processing the image into some form of narrative as it is simply impossible to achieve a simultaneous apprehension of the image's entirety the way one can and does when reading the intellectually bite-size pieces presented in standard comics. Elvis Road enables -- one might even go so far as to say forces -- the reader to invent a new approach to reading the image, as the methods developed to read a standard comic book will be insufficient here. The temporal dimension necessarily becomes opened to the reader, who can and must move forward and backward, left and right, up and down through the image, in the process assigning a temporal order. This in turn will allow the reader an opportunity to examine and reevaluate just how the distinct order and layouts of panels that constitute standard comic book language represent a digestion of visual experience, and to ponder that it may very well be just this compartmentalization of experience into discrete units that forms our sense of time as a narrative. In other words, Elvis Road is a meta-narrative in comics. It achieves, through the authors' choice of presenting an entire "saga" in a single image, an auto-critique of standard comics' narrative forms. In addition, it harkens back to the tapestry, which is, arguably, one of the tributary streams that served as a source for the mighty river of comics; and by doing so hints at further, overlooked possibilities for comics in the future.
Elvis Road is now out of print, but we still have a few copies available. LIMIT: one per customer.