Home > CR Reviews
The Yellow Zine Issue Two
posted June 6, 2012
Creator: Roman Muradov
Publishing Information: Self-Published, mini-comic, 16 pages, 2012, $6
Ordering Numbers: You can buy it here.
Purposefully frustrating and frequently pretty, Roman Muradov's collection of "pretentious comics & funnies" may work best as a series of answers to the question of how an artist can work in a milieu his peers have so thoroughly explored so as to make one's own forays take on the air of self-parody, like it or not. It's a guarded, conflicted, and almost choked by paralysis little effort; reading it is like expecting to see an actor perform a standard monologue onstage but just as you settle in the artist plops down next to you and mutters his lines into his sleeve. I liked this comic for all the reasons I expect some people will hate it.
It's entirely possible to enjoy
The Yellow Zine Issue Two for its surface qualities, the general attractiveness of the effort. I'm most fond of a black and white page about halfway through, which depicts a kind of routine man/woman encounter by dropping just enough information to make you project onto it any way you'd prefer. Muradov's line work sags and surges and settles in very fetching ways when he wants it to, certainly enough to build something sustained and worthwhile if that veneer of hesitancy and self-loathing can be pierced. For now I'll take whatever he wants to provide us.
