STRIP

Erotic. Provocative. Macabre. Brilliant.

Sarah Gordon’s Strip is the dark side of independent comics in the UK, the shadow cast by a community obsessed with courting Jonathan Cape and The Observer in the vain hope of somehow gaining legitimacy by distancing itself from the tropes and genres that popularised Western sequential art in the first place.

Strip is raw, uncensored, unafraid to titillate, and unashamedly transgressive. Wordlessly, Gordon manipulates the reader with only four colours, capturing the form of the female body more realistically than the vast majority of her peers and creating a protagonist that is both gleeful and haunting.

Utilising page layouts and panel counts masterfully to increase the ebb and flow of narration, this is a singular piece of art at only 40 pages long, with an economical linework that shines in a comic almost entirely devoid of backgrounds, setting or anchor.

If you’re looking for plot, you’ve come to the wrong place. If instead you want to explore the razor’s edge between burlesque and exploitation, between baring your soul through your art and taking a blade to your wrists, then Strip will delight and dazzle you. An early contender for comic of the year.

INFO: STRIP / CREATOR: SARAH GORDON / PUBLISHER: SELF-PUBLISHER / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW