It’s not all that often that beautiful songs find themselves recreated as a exquisitely-realised piece of comic book art, which is a pity when you think about it because the two share of the same richly-descriptive DNA.
Some, realised Sean Edgar of Paste Magazine one cold December morning in 2014, much more than others.
Case in point – Neko Case’s “Wild Creatures” song, the latest in a transcendently long line of songs that as Edgar describes it, draw together “haunting, bittersweet tales of loss, reconciliation and redemption” which has been gifted a whole new realm of expression by the evocative work of Emily Carroll, a comic book artist of captivating imagination and artistry.
They go together as perfectly as two artistic expressions of the human soul ever possibly could, something Edgar justifiably rhapsodises about in his piece on the first of Paste magazine is calling its Songs Illustrated series:
“Luckily, there’s only one creator who can express Neko’s meticulous balance of elegance, power and menace in her work: Emily Carroll. Her print collection of harrowing fairy and folk tales, Through the Woods, easily landed our best comics of 2014 list. Her subsequent output has confirmed her as one of the premier storytellers of the field, a sentiment echoed by two Eisner nominations this year. I could ramble all day about how the work of Neko and Emily harmonize on so many different levels, but the below comic speaks more articulately than I could ever could.”
It is, indeed a beautiful coming together of these two remarkable of talents, proof positive that ideas hatched at 3.30 in the morning can have the most magical and heart-stirring of outworkings.
(source: Paste magazine)
