Press Enter to Continue
by Ana Galvan
translated by Jamie Richards
Fantagraphics
Fantagraphics
2019
Press Enter to Continue is a collection of five short comics by Spanish artist Ana Galvan. Each comic is sort of dreamlike, or really, nightmarish. Galvan's art combines relatively simple line-drawing with complex digital color.
In the first, silent story shows a woman walking down the street. She keeps splitting duplicates off from herself. Then a tiger starts to chase her. The tiger spawns duplicates too. Some of the tigers kill and eat some of the women.
A new trapeze artist joins a circus. He is fascinated by the living doll. The other performers warn him away from her. She was once popular, now ignored. She might have something to do with the disappearance of the old trapeze artist.
A woman in a job interview keeps hearing a humming sound. The interviewer tells her to ignore it. She can't. She accuses the interviewer of using a button to trigger the sound. Congratulations! She has passed the test, and can return tomorrow for the next phase of the interview. She leaves on hands and knees through a dog door.
Children in a futuristic reeducation camp seem to be both being taught and technologically altered to make them identical, to bring them up to some ideal. They make a plan to stay friends and meet again outside the camp, but they don't know if it'll work.
In the longest story, a woman keeps hallucinating a little boy saying his name. She discovers a secret society who thinks this and related images are being projected into the minds of vulnerable people via some sort of transmitter. They give her a code to type into her home computer that should somehow protect her. She sees the vision again, starts to enter the code, but then wonders, what if the boy is a real memory that was suppressed? Is the real deception the image of the boy, or the claim that he is a deceit?
Galvan's colors are rainbow hued, and tend to be soft except for pops of neon. Each page is entirely colored, often in an ombre, with additional colors picking out details in the art, or just adding geometric shapes and splotches of contrast that seem to serve only a decorative role. Her drawings are maybe halfway between Tom Gauld and someone like Michael DeForge or Jesse Jacobs. Her coloring is like no one else.
In the first, silent story shows a woman walking down the street. She keeps splitting duplicates off from herself. Then a tiger starts to chase her. The tiger spawns duplicates too. Some of the tigers kill and eat some of the women.
A new trapeze artist joins a circus. He is fascinated by the living doll. The other performers warn him away from her. She was once popular, now ignored. She might have something to do with the disappearance of the old trapeze artist.
A woman in a job interview keeps hearing a humming sound. The interviewer tells her to ignore it. She can't. She accuses the interviewer of using a button to trigger the sound. Congratulations! She has passed the test, and can return tomorrow for the next phase of the interview. She leaves on hands and knees through a dog door.
Children in a futuristic reeducation camp seem to be both being taught and technologically altered to make them identical, to bring them up to some ideal. They make a plan to stay friends and meet again outside the camp, but they don't know if it'll work.
In the longest story, a woman keeps hallucinating a little boy saying his name. She discovers a secret society who thinks this and related images are being projected into the minds of vulnerable people via some sort of transmitter. They give her a code to type into her home computer that should somehow protect her. She sees the vision again, starts to enter the code, but then wonders, what if the boy is a real memory that was suppressed? Is the real deception the image of the boy, or the claim that he is a deceit?
Galvan's colors are rainbow hued, and tend to be soft except for pops of neon. Each page is entirely colored, often in an ombre, with additional colors picking out details in the art, or just adding geometric shapes and splotches of contrast that seem to serve only a decorative role. Her drawings are maybe halfway between Tom Gauld and someone like Michael DeForge or Jesse Jacobs. Her coloring is like no one else.
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