Reviews

The Biologic Show by Al Columbia

xolotlll's review

4.0

These comics are very, very personal. It's as if the young Columbia saw some hidden place at the edge of the world and fixed his gaze on it just long enough to put it in ink. The subject matter is shocking in a distinctly juvenile way, but the stories are so saturated in Columbia's strange taste for the transcendent that it just doesn't matter. There's a real emotional authenticity here, too. I'm struck by the deep sense of melancholy in Extinction when the man on the bench begins to cry, or in Ersatz (A Family Name) when Pim stops fabricating stories about his family to go eat cookies. The world of The Biologic Show is richly suggestive, always alluding to something beyond or between panels. In Extinction, for example, it's not quite clear what the association is between Crowley and the murder on the bench. And we'll probably never know what's going on with Francie's double at the end of Peloria: Part One (A Pim and Francie Adventure), but - like Columbia's later collection The Golden Bear Days - it's no less powerful for its incompleteness.

You can read about the background to the comic in this interview with the author.