REVIEW: RED EYE, BLACK EYE
Reviewed by Ed Mathews

Red Eye, Black Eye
By K. Thor Jensen
Release: January 2007
Format: Manga-sized 5" x 7" Black and White; 304 pages
ISBN: 1-891867-99-7
DCD: NOV063235.
$19.95 US
Publisher: Alternative Comics
Genre: Autobiographical/Biographical Journal

K. Thor Jensen sets off on an ambitious journey that becomes its own type of narrative. This is not a story, rather a series of stories with an overall view of American life. What would it be like to drop everything, grab a universal bus pass with a 60-day limit and stay with people you only knew from online? This book is a snapshot of a leap of faith from all parties involved and a realistic photo develops.

Others will tell you that this book is a critique of post-9/11 American society. That’s an incomplete assessment. Jensen, through a series of disconnected journal entries, does a much more interesting analysis of internet comix subculture. Yes, this is a post-9/11 book, but which came first? Blind trust in total strangers (on both sides of the blogosphere) in an environment where Boston officials can’t understand an Aquateen Hunger Force ad campaign or did that type of environment transform everyone just enough to make this trip possible? Is it a reaction to the general paranoia? We don’t get that answer in this book, but it is an underlying question. Jensen plays inadvertent sociologist.

As an overall narrative, the book is disjointed and at times; some chapters seem to have sections that lack a point. As an overall work, those parts fit the overall theme, however, as sometimes there is no point. As a series of individual stories of real people in different parts of the United States of America, this book hits all the right voyeuristic chords. This is Reality Comix. Would it work again? It worked this time as people come off as uninhibited to be themselves. 10,000 miles and a return to New York City and the book succeeds in making the reader wonder how this could be Jensen’s first collection.

Highly Recommended

Ed Mathews is Co-Editor in Chief of PopImage.


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