‘Marble Cake’.
Created by Scott Jason Smith.
Published by Avery Hill.
£11.99 - Full Colour - 120 pages.
The Story - ‘Tracey dreams of a life beyond South London. Beyond her job at the supermarket. Beyond what amounts to now. But in a city where everyone is living their own melodrama, where people are disappearing with alarming regularity and where existence overlaps and separates at every turn, how can Tracey be sure she's the main character in her own life, let alone a bit part in someone else's.’
The Review - I been reviewing books that have been published by Avery Hill for quite a few years now and I think this is one of the best looking books they have put out so far. A nice long read at 120 pages and full of great looking colour pages with a really impressively expressive style to them.
Sure there is a mystery at play in these pages, a couple in fact. But the disappearances and tube assaults are secondary to the social drama and the intermingling of the lives of Smith’s players. This is a really impressive exercise in allowing the reader into the private lives of a cast of different people. These are people that you see every day in a city, in the supermarket, down the pub, in the cafe and also most importantly in their own private moments. We walk alongside the lives of the seemingly ordinary people whose lives criss-cross throughout Marble Cake.
As a past occupant for many years of South London I recognise Tracey and the streets she walks home, the buses she travels on and the daily toil that she keeps shrugging off and moving ever onwards with. Through her life you are introduced to others. We see shirtless yobs, worried mothers, hair obsessed shampoo/razor purchasing supermarket customers, school kids stuck up trees, masturbatory maniacs who hate back packs, drunken and overly chatty blokes down the pub, and many more. Smith shows the loneliness that is often in us all even when surrounded by people. He makes some great use of the inner thoughts and forgotten monologues of what we see and do in the hum-drum day.
“I can think, I can poo in peace, no distractions.’
As the reader keeps their eye on the page the relationships and links between the cast of this play link and spiral out from each other. The creator uses a number of great call-backs to events earlier in the book to make you look twice at people and in doing so you often are made to see these people in a different light. He uses some of the people as stage dressing too. There’s a great sequence with some deft pacing where Tracey goes on a first date. This happens at a table in a pub but rather than focus on what is happening we get a foreground shot of a man sat at the bar drinking himself into a coma. All the while the date is going on behind him, wordless and quietly.
This isn’t just a grim drama, oh no. This has a really sharply observed and genuinely funny sense of humour about it’s story. The humour comes often from the nonsense we think/worry/talk about.
‘What is this bog roll doing here? ....handy though.’
One of the favourite panel to panel transitions I’ve seen in comics for a while happens in this book too. We start with a one night stand and possibly ill-advised sexual encounter that is dealt with in silhouette and move into the mixing of a cake being baked by the woman involved’s mother at the same time. This really did make me chuckle. There are also quite a few visual Easter Eggs not least of all Tintin’s dog Snowy who turns up to take a well timed piss on the wall of the local pub.
The art has an individual style to it’s line and colour. I found a couple of moments confusing where the scenes shifted between characters in that I occasionally wasn’t sure for a moment who I was now reading about but this is inevitable in a book with such a large cast.
I’d get on this while you can. It’s looking like a June release from Avery Hill and you can find this one and others in their catalogue over at https://averyhillpublishing.bigcartel.com/product/marble-cake-by-scott-jason-smith or follow them on Twitter @AveryHillPubl
You can find the creator here https://www.scottjasonsmith.com/ and follow him on Twitter @MrScottieJSmith
Many thanks for reading.
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