Obscure Comic of the Month is a column where I take a look at a comic or series that hasn't really been talked about. This covers independent comics, zines, weird spin-offs, webcomics and more.
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Twenty Thirty Three Special Edition by En Gingerboom – 2019
Mild Spoilers
When writing about comics for this column it sometimes becomes difficult to know exactly what to qualify a comic as. In the author's notes, En Gingerboom classifies Twenty Thirty Three ultimately as a failure of a project. It originally started life as a children's book, bouncing between fantastical fairytale fair and a more grounded, but still optimistic, post-apocalyptic tale of survival . The various iterations were something that the author developed over a series of years, and ultimately settled on a short, dialogue-free comic featuring reinterpretations of the more fairytale versions of the characters.
As a supposed failure I'm not really sure how to talk about Twenty Thirty Three. So I'm just going to talk about it as a I would any comic. From the get go the story is deliberately vague. We only know the character's names and circumstances from ID cards printed behind the front and back covers of the book itself, and the rest of the story simply gives snapshots of a life lived by three young girls travelling from somewhere to somewhere in Britain.
To tell a story with such sparsity requires a great sense of place and character. To be communicated entirely through images even more so. The tone carried entirely by what we see, not by what we are told. At this Twenty Thirty Three is very deft and intriguing from almost the outset. The nature of the apocalypse, if it can even be classified as one through what little information we actually have, is left deliberately obscured. In a sense it doesn't even really matter, it's the survivors that this story is concerned with.
The young girls Molly, Ruby and Phyllis all have distinct visual flair, and as the story goes on, strong personalities. Flipping through the pages, moving from panel to panel, you will find yourself moving backwards and forwards, re-reading earlier points with a greater understanding of who these people are and what motivates them. While there are moments of threat, the heart of the story is about the act of living. Food is cultivated, stories are shared and love and friendship happens almost between the margins.
The grounded nature of the story for the most part does not prevent some of the more fantastical and fairytale aspects bleeding through . Mrs Mackenzie, the girl's magical witch mentor in earlier iterations of the story, still appears in the main plot and this serves to make the scope of the story feel larger. Likewise there are implications of greater supernatural events happening in the background, and at one point more explicitly in the foreground, but again their nature is left vague and open to interpretation.
The exact message of the story itself falls into the hands of the reader to decide. Is the story whimsical, or is there a more sinister edge bubbling under the surface? Ultimately, I think it's this ambiguous nature that makes Twenty Thirty Three so successful. The story is like a puzzle, with the reading and re-reading akin to fitting jigsaw pieces into place, and while I don't think this picture will ever fully be filled out, there are greater mysteries to be explored for those willing to look.
The Special Edition includes all the work in progress from earlier iterations and the writer's commentary, which makes not only the further study of the plot more engaging, but also serves as an intriguing look behind the curtain at where the story started and how it got to where it is.
Is the comic a failure? I don't know, but if it is it's certainly an interesting one.
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Jack Harvey 2022. Gawain and the Green Knight (c) 2019 En Gingerboom . Images used under Fair Use.
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