(GUEST REVIEW BY JAKE AUSTEN) (Secret Acres) After
consuming Ellsworth’s enriching, confounding, mesmerizing, beyond beautiful
epic, I understand the story less than I did before I started it, but I am
satisfied, in awe, and quite frankly, I couldn’t eat another bite. Other than
some traces of the idiosyncratic weirdness of the Fort Thunder collective,
Ellsworth’s work doesn’t invoke other comics makers, instead bringing to mind
the most intriguing elements of “high art,” and outsider art (such as the
precious obsessiveness of Chris Ofili’s pencil drawings and the maddened
immoderation of Henry Darger’s work). By positioning genuinely strange
nightmare vision figures against astonishingly dense, richly textured
backgrounds, Ellsworth presides over a shotgun wedding between 3-D dynamism and
soothing flatness. This eerie fairytale (mostly taking place in the mind of an
immobilized mummy, and involving ghosts, a laughing demon, and a three-eyed
house gnome) comes to a sort of
satisfying conclusion that may or may not resolve (?) with the character/artist
drawing a/this story, but despite my confusion, I unequivocally enjoyed the bewildering
experience of navigating this visual feast. Perhaps there is another comparable
cartoonist – I could never follow former Chicagoan Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix, but I still consider it
one of the greatest pieces of contemporary cartooning. Ellsworth, likewise, has
cohesively combined the confounding and convincing.
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