AIDAN KOCH’S AFTER NOTHING COMES
After Nothing Comes, by Aidan Koch. Toronto: Koyama Press, 2016. 112 pages.
AIDAN KOCH’S exquisitely drawn comics in this collected volume of six zines exist in the space between the seen and the obscured, memory and amnesia, speech and silence, comics and “fine art.” Koch’s visual and textual vocabulary is full of palimpsests, fragments, snippets of conversation, and partial landscapes. Her experimental pieces can be called comics insofar as they are contained by a grid on the page (usually) and combine text with images. But their sequential structure is harder to pin down, and the stories do without traditional protagonists or linear plot. Nonetheless, their juxtaposition with masterfully drawn, often abstract images holds our attention and demands interpretation as narrative.
As the title suggests, the previously published zines collected here offer a meditation on emptiness. The central question of the book—“What is after nothing?”—is posed on a page of otherwise, well, empty panels. The title piece implies that the “nothing” in question is the eventual obliteration of the earth. The first page depicts what might be interpreted as the abstraction of matter, a primordial soup, and the indistinct shape of a disembodied hand—God’s hand, or the artist’s—a common motif throughout Koch’s work. A sequence of mixed-media images of runes, stones, geologic formations, and human figures that resemble geologic formations follows. Within these pages, the immense (universe, mountain range) and the minute (pebble, person) are collapsed. Loose, gestural pencil marks and precisely defined line work allow for a tension between the vast and the particular.
Koch plays with visual and emotional blankness: figures smudged out, active negative space, white panels, and text that’s erased or simply cryptic (“Your ever shifting presence / Changes the landscape / You’re moving / We’re just adjusting”). These read like echoes in the visible landscape, atmospheric and cumulative rather than expository. The black-and-white drawings reveal just enough and nothing more.
Koch’s figures at times recall Edgar Degas’s elegant pencil studies, at others Henry Darger’s strange pinup children. Fluid and unaffected, each image appears drawn from life, even while her style ranges from the abstract to the highly articulated. The printing itself preserves the paper color and every smudge on the page, giving the book the feeling of an artifact of her now mostly out-of-print originals.
Dark, a work from 2009, offers another interpretation of the book’s central question: What comes after death? A faceless figure says, “You should never be lonely” (though nothingness and death, we presume, are full of loneliness). We see a cloak thrown off—the cover of one’s body and perceptions—and a transition into darkness. “You exist here now,” says the void, complete with a skull, “in the dark.”
Not only do Koch’s stories follow a nonlinear path but they bend toward past and future simultaneously. “Someday,” from Vastness No. One (2009) distills a yearning for a future (“Someday / We will have two beautiful daughters”) that might already be past, as two girls are seen riding horses away into the landscape, into the blank space, and disappearing. The Dancer at Midnight (2012) describes the precise choreography of stars—predictable as clockwork far into the future, and at the same time ancient, possibly already extinct. The first and earliest piece in the book, Warmer (2008), is a collection of moments without a clear connecting thread of time, characters, or place. The effect is a sense of repeating without being repetitive, and of long passages of time between the panels. One feels the mind stuck in place even as the body moves on. “Everything happens again / and again / Is it the same? / Am I the same?”
If the book has shortcomings, they appear in the text, which has a tendency to oscillate between vague, grandiose pronouncements and disjointed bits of dialogue of an unidentified speaker and an unidentified “you” (“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me that way / Why? / I can’t stand it”). At times, the text overwhelms the more subtle visual narrative with clichéd remarks: “Do you ever feel like you’re building walls?” And “What is after nothing?” is answered, unfortunately, by a text bubble relegated to the margin: “Nothing, I guess.” This flippant reply could well have been left out, allowing the images alone to reveal an answer. Perhaps these scraps of poetry resemble teenage musings because the author was still, in fact, an undergraduate art student when she created Warmer.
Nonetheless, After Nothing Comes performs an exciting break from the traditional graphic-novel medium. Koch’s art functions as well on a gallery wall as in a book (she creates sculpture and drawings, and exhibits regularly). She pays profound attention to interior moments, but also to tectonic shifts in the landscape that may take thousands of years to perceive, allowing us to visualize our world beyond the limits of the Anthropocene. On those pages that are populated by humans, the subtle body language Koch depicts conveys a naturalism not found in most comics. The work is also more mysterious—do the blank stares of Koch’s subjects represent inner despair or profound peace? As in life, it’s hard to tell.
Danica Novgorodoff is an artist and graphic novelist based in New York. She is a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Literature, and her books include Refresh, Refresh (included in The Best American Comics 2011 [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]) and The Undertaking of Lily Chen (First Second Books, 2014).
