Title: Tourist
Writer and Artist: Mark Ryan
The world of comics is wonderful in its vast array of artists and creators. Every genre imaginable can be found in the artist alleys and small press sections of conventions across the world. Super Heroes? Got that! Horror? You bet! Romance? Aisle four on the left! Tragic teen vampire romance manga? Oh, that right over there between the gratuitous T&A artist and children’s book about superhero penguins. I really thought I had seen it all.
Then write/artist Mary Ryan asks if I can take a look at his new book Tourist and I honestly don’t know what genre this would fit in. It’s defiantly art, make no mistake about that. It actually reminds me of the work Peter Chung did on Aeon Flux back in the early 1990s. It’s hard for me to comment on the story as there very little discernible text or story that I can tell, but that didn’t stop me from looking at every page over and over again trying to find one. I was beginning to think that I was tourist just taking in the sights and trying to make sense of a foreign culture.
“What culture?”, you ask. I can only assume the drug culture, or perhaps a mental illness that induces hallucinations. The art in this book is flat-out crazy. You find yourself rotating the pages just to see if you’re looking at it the right way, giving up, and then looking at it again.
The best summary I can come up with is that Tourist is what I imagine a psychedelic drug trip is like. Not a bad poopy-trip, more like a, “Whoa, is that real?” kinda trip.
