SDCC COVERAGE SPONSORED BY MAD CAVE
The LDC Online Comics Fair wraps up in about a week, July 1-31 2025. And happy to report I’ve found some fractured gems. The fair is small, well curated, pretty creative. PDFs you buy and keep. By no means do these dark, weird books represent the bespoke scope of reads available at the LDC Fair. But if you like it when a comic infects your brain, I have something for you.
Dream Machine
Ky Lawrence
£6.00
Deeply bizarre science fiction that reminds me of Glacier Bay mostly because it’s too hard to compare it to a single artist but there’s overall vibe match. Freddy Carrasco ink sculpting. Satoshi Kon, who else would dare be so goofy and unreal, and yet so incredibly bleak and rooted- in the same comic. Cyberpunk healthcare nightmare of giving your twin a disease and then digitally swapping brains to say you’re sorry. The place we meet in the middle is ghoulish and flyblown, hollowed out sockets for eyes and bare teeth framed by pulled back lips, a dead voice says no. But getting there is a transparent microscopic digital bubble puppy bus running full tilt down the brain tunnel, with an even tinier and even cuter dog homunculus behind the wheel.
The medical machinery, the computer interface, and depictions of twins that imagine their mental connection made (meta)physical. Expressive and anxious artwork, filled in with blacks and made monochrome with artful screentone. Mother also has its microscopic little fellas and stylized animal-person protagonist, but there is a lightness in that comic that Ky Lawrence stays out of. A heavy sci fi story where the science is all totally made up bonkers nonsense, but logically sound as long as you don’t ask how the head swap like, works. It does work. But the problems run deeper than a kind gesture and a silly little dog vehicle can fix.
I felt myself pulled in two ways, both dark, by Dream Machine. Despite its psychedelic method of connection, the story is very straightforward. Everything on the page is alive with an expressionist disregard for realism that feels fabricated and fixed (and yet also free and without bounds). What really matters is how Lawrence makes you feel, and after reading this, I was abuzz with awe and tension. As was the case with pretty much all of the comics I’ve read from the LDC comics fair, I thought I knew the book I was walking into based on its look, but there were dimensions to it I didn’t expect.
Mother
Abs Bailey
£8.00
Going goblin mode so hard a mold starts to grow on her body is only the start of this misadventure. Not another cutesy aesthetic in contrast to body horror; the real rot is in the mind. Mother zooms in to the microbe level, where all the various growths hang out. A tiny mirror, weird self-imposed social structure by the germ who is desperate to be popular, needed, loved, chosen, special. Struggle between who mother talks to and who she doesn’t gets weird. Because mom is off: she’s nurturing the growing mold patch on her body like it’s her child. Inside her heart shaped eyes is an image of a butterfly’s wings being pulled off. Psychological horror, emotional abuse instead of biological spectacle. The stress in the chest for the one or two decent microbes caught between a wicked creator and a community of her emotionally numb sycophants.
The molecular spectacular on display in Mother is the microbe world, equal parts scientifically accurate and 1930s cartoon balloon art. So Adventure Time looking little dudes, but against a backdrop of color patterns that resemble a Persian carpet. Abs Bailey uses a lot of beautiful, constructed imagery throughout the book, raising the bad parent out of their filthy apartment, suspended in the center of an ornate visual motif. Like Alabaster Pizzo or Ron Rege Jr‘s mix of clearly planned and freely executed, party people with an abyss instead of a good side (see also the comics of Grayson Bear). Art less eerie and more absurd than Dream Machine. But the story every bit as saturated with gloom and black humor.
The approach is comics confident, instead of relying on a loose inner logic justifying why this or that weird thing happened, multiple levels of real and unreal commingle in Mother because jumping around aesthetically while maintaining a mood is how comics work. Bailey runs with it.
LDC, initially short for Laydeez Do Comics, was launched in 2009 by Dr Nicola Streeten and Sarah Lightman as an initiative to highlight comics based on “the drama of the everyday.” LDComics is a Community Interest Company that has hosted workshops, monthly guest presentations, festivals, annual prizes in support of graphic novels in progress. Comics creator interested in working with them in the future? The door is open, via their website.
This is the first LDC Online Comics Fair.
Not everything I’ve read from LDC has been disquieting. Imaginative, yes, in markedly different ways. But these two comics complimented each other in their combination of darkness and deadpan silliness. These were both highly sophisticated comics, the kind of work you’d see from a publisher like Avery Hill or Koyama or Highwater. The LDC online fair is what’s next.
The LDC Online Comics Fair runs from July 1st through the 31st.
SDCC COVERAGE SPONSORED BY MAD CAVE
