Her work is much more restless and experimental, but I got a lot of the same pleasures from it as I do from Sam Alden’s stuff. None of it quite clicked at first, but on a second read-through I found I was able to orient myself and came to like it a lot. Panel borders, for example, might be indefinite like smoke, or porous to the elements it contains. Around the images she plays cleverly with panels, text, scale and all sorts of other tricks, usually introducing a formal element while letting it collapse in the same image.
Visually it looks kind of like a sketchbook onto which she’s imposed a narrative monologue: borders and bubbles are pretty rare, it’s usually just one or two partly finished drawings per page, often with a still life or landscape quality to the art. A lot of comic artists dabble with travelogue in the early stages of their career, and it’s led to some of the dullest comics imaginable, but in Ramirez’s case there’s a lot of formal play going on, raising the temperature to that of poetry. Mara Ramirez’s debut graphic novel Moab, from 2020, is an account of a road trip in Utah that almost went wrong, turned into 160 postcard-sized pages of soft pencil drawings and patient text. Her art, particularly on her human figures, is so distinctive and has never looked better, but she hasn’t managed to make the actual substance of the dream remotely interesting to an outside observer. It’s not without interest to it though – there’s a potent psychosexual quality to the imagery, in the fleshiness and gender ambiguity of Ostergren’s avatar, the strange costumes everyone is wearing, and the repeated scenes of characters plunging into or bursting out of orifice-like holes in the ground.
It doesn’t last long enough to be interminable but it’s clearly heading that way. Each individual scene broadly makes sense but there are hard breaks between scenes that leave the reader unable to orient themselves, and in any case it’s not like anything important or meaningful is taking place anyway.
The subtitle here is “a dream revisited” and I’m not sure what the revisited part means but this is very literally a dream narrative, about a girl (or two girls) entering a surreal world via a hole in the ground. This one has a different format to her regular minis – it’s a thicker, full-colour book with beautiful gold embossing on the cover a real showcase for her distinctive art. A 2011 piece from the Swedish creator who is probably best known for her Evil Dresses trilogy, if she’s known for anything, which she’s not.
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