Antics begins with a metaphysical origin story. The four elements came together and life was created, but so was death.

Life was the goal and result of a united effort between the elements but now death seeks to unravel all that work. The story then shows a girl ignoring her alarm clock and waking up late.

The linework is very light and almost has a sketchy quality. Antics is mostly streaking greys with bits of white. There are no word balloons, but there are smudges with white lettering serving the purpose. Overall, the effect is very dream like and moody. It does also make it very hard to follow what is going on. Let me give you an example from the opening comics:

There are two girls in a high school setting in Ontario, Canada. They look very similiar to me, but they have different hair styles and one is named Ami while the other is Lys. There’s a boy named David who tries to show one of the girls a little attention but the other gets upset. Then, not too much later one girl is falling through the air and complaining that the other girl is sleeping. She falls into water and starts to talk with the mistress of the sea. It continues on, but there are more events and conversations like that.

You see? Many comics later, there is a brief explanation that one of the girls fainted and got very cold. This was, in fact, all some kind of dream. Almost immediately after that is another transition for the other girl who began talking to some other strange entity. There is a lot left unexplained.

The themes that I’m seeing revolve around being left alone and having your decisions made by someone else than yourself. I would say decisions forced by circumstance but in Antics, almost everything is alive. The girls are stuck in a dream world.

Something I did like is that, in later comics, Antics has some unusual panel splits. There are designs like this one that leave some panels open. This helps with that dreamy mood that’s being maintained. Other artists accomplish the same thing by leaving a lot of empty space around odd sized panels. This might be a potentially useful technique for the comic artists reading this review.

Overall, I found Antics hard to understand. There is a more recent comic that explains enough of what has been going on that it makes sense (up to that point.) The storytelling focuses mostly on conversations so you don’t see much in the way of physical movement between places or obvious story and character progress. My confusion might be, in part, due to not being able to grasp the feminine sensibility of the artist. It does seem as if the artist knows what story she is telling and the art fits the mood. I give Antics two stars. Rating:

Antics
by Kristina Foster
http://antics.comicgenesis.com/
review by Delos Woodruff
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading …