Lorem Ipsum

A while back, Jhayne pointed me to a webcomic called The Secret Knots, by Juan Santapau. I just finally got around to reading through the archive, and I wanted to post to recommend the comic.

(There've been a total of about 90 strips so far; you can read through the whole archive in a couple hours.)

Up until this year, it's mostly consisted of one-shot single-page stories, without repeating characters, posted anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months apart. (Though a few of the strips include tiny references-in-passing to past ones.) Recurring topics and themes include relationships, communication (or lack thereof) and language and stories, movies (usually fictional), writers and musicians and other creators (ditto), and a lovely slightly surreal tinge that reminds me of a particular prose author but I can't quite think who. I also like the art, which varies through a range of styles, and the language, which is often nicely poetic, and the tone, which is often a little oblique, sometimes a little nostalgic or elegiac or wistful, sometimes a little spooky.

This year, the comic has been a continuous storyline, which is interesting so far, but so far isn't my favorite of the stories. So here are some strips from past years that I particularly liked, to whet your appetite if you haven't encountered this comic before:

Captions

About watching movies in Stryaic (the language of the tiny country of Strye), with subtitles.

Casual Reading

A wordless story about strangers meeting on public transit, and a book.

Leaving the city

I once planned to write a story based on a similar idea about signs, but never got around to it, and this takes a different approach anyway. Also a bit reminiscent of Rachel Kincaid's 2008 SH story “Tell Her.”

Novel's ending

Art, life, metaphor.

We don't mean the same

Words have different effects on different people.

Matryoshka

Stories within stories.