At Winchester Comics Fair on 19th October 2024, I happened to be tabled right next to Miranda Smart. Sideways glances across at her table, prints and books produced by screenprinting and risograph. I came home with memories of pinks, greens, other strong colours and colour combinations that were threading their way into my brain…like so many benign worms. And the odd shapes, at times spiky or brambly like strange growths from another planet, at times floating like corpuscles or protein blobs, making the world world an interior gigantic human body like in Fantastic Voyage, where we will either drown in fluids or be eaten by antibodies. Already I feel at home.
One print she was showing to a prospective customer. I think it might have been ‘Punchy’. It was a twisted vision, a vibrant turmoil of the shapes I normally see when I’m lying in bed delirious with a fever. In answer to a question, she may have replied “anger…like I’m angry with myself”. Certainly you could look into the vortex here and see a kind of internal visual dynamic on the page, a strong force holding the picture elements together, or at least trying to hold them down – quite often we’ve got visual signs here that seem resist containment, ready to pull apart, fly off into space.
Smart has, I gather, been cast together with other artists and creators including Peony Gent, Olivia Sullivan, and Gareth A Hopkins. In 2021 they exhibited together under the rubric of “Abstraction in Comics”. Of these, I have touched the pages of certain Hopkins creations – and I’m still trying to come to terms with them. It is certainly tempting to put these artists together in the same seraglio, but do they really share that much common ground? Hopkins seems to me to be ploughing his own furrow – it’s something to do with disrupting linear narrative in the strongest ways imaginable, starting with the very pages of the book itself. Smart is evidently trying to simplify story-telling, but not dispense with it; her page designs and grids have a precision and balance that Mondrian would be proud of. And there’s a lot of strong imagery underpinning her supposedly “abstract” shapes – forms drawn from observations of nature, well-constructed geometric shapes, detailed examinations of things resembling microscopic life forms and entities…
Turning round in my brain also was “psychedelic posters” and their associated artists…by which I mean the West Coast of America in the 1960s and artists such as Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Greg Irons, Stanley Mouse and others…I’m relieved to find this is a valid connection to make and Smart (from her art school studies) was exposed to such work and may even have drawn some influence from it. It’s well known that some of these artists crossed over from rock music poster design into underground comics and back again, Griffin and Moscoso being especially gifted with making use of full strength process colours, sometimes even hand-separating them. Since then, few comics creators have seen fit to learn any lessons from these 1960s pioneers, their design skills, and their playful approach to panel arrangement, stories formed from visual puns or bold layouts rather than from tightly-scripted written narratives…but Smart has taken their work as a given, and gone further. If the undergrounds wanted to evoke the LSD experience with their hyper-detailed, floating shapes, Smart is attempting to build a page so powerful that just reading it can make the audience “trip out”…or perhaps experience something even worse. Am I wrong in seeing a slightly diseased subtext in some of these pages and tableaus? Perhaps not, as at least one project may have come out of the COVID pandemic and either attempted to nail down that nasty bug in visual form, or drag the reader across a five-day bout of sickness, in terms of twisted visual narrative.
Then there’s the sound-art / music tie-in, which Smart achieves by collaborating directly with musicians, distributing the results on Soundcloud, or issuing a comic with a CDR or Bandcamp download. The psychedelic artists likewise strived hard to align their curlicues and intense colours with the music of Hendrix or Jefferson Airplane, but Smart has gone a little better, even openly inviting readers to propose alternative soundtracks to each reading experience. Harry Smith, that deranged beatnik of NYC who painted and printed directly on films in the 1950s, worked hard to present a moving-image analogue to the jazz of Thelonious Monk; maybe some charitable soul should equip Miranda Smart with a 16mm projector and a supply of unprinted film stock, and await results.
In short, these highly original colours and shapes of Miranda Smart stand a chance of penetrating to the places where normal comics do not reach…much emotion, much therapy and catharsis, unafraid even to touch on themes of mental illness, disease, terror. “Confront your creative and existential fears” is just one of the mottos she lives by; I’m all for it. Now I’ve got these indelible images lodged in a part of my brain, and I cannot shake them loose.
All images this post are © Copyright 2024 by Miranda Smart