Review by Win Wiacek
If you’re seeking a different spin on comics, it’s always best to look to the margins, as with this compilation of heartfelt, dizzyingly drawn deliberations from US self-publishing phenomenon L. Pidge.
Based in the Colorado Rockies and collaborating with life/work partner and colourist Chase Hutchison, they have also generated reading matter of substance in Fast Times and Heavy Rotation and contributed/edited numerous micropress anthologies. Pidge spends her off times teaching middle schoolers or drawing, and there’s also life stuff, snowboarding and lots of knitting going on too.
Their multigenerational, pan-dimensional, picaresque cosmic roads epic serial Infinite Wheatpaste has been nominated for Ignatz and other awards, making many keen fans as it unfolds a wild ride of inner exploration and external personal advancement and communal adventure.
Pidge supplies a truly eccentric cast involved and interlinking in exploits all over the worlds. There’s timing and schedule challenged college student Soe who’s addicted to knitting and fashionably-stewed libations. She’s a true pal to all, but remains troubled by being an elemental goddess. Gene-mash-up and itinerant wanderer Casimir is in need of big changes to his life, and recently-bereaved widower/aging automaton Otis (0T-15) is just trying to stay stable and get by. There’s thoroughly decent happy-go-lucky guy Groob, failing-his-rehab Jeff (AKA fiery god Supernova). There’s also best friend Addy and her partner (seer/sorceress/shamus) Lilah to be going on with, but they’re just the tip of an ever-expanding astral iceberg. They’re supplemented by an endless progression of buddies, beverages and buses, caffeine, ciggies and cats (-ish).
Opening with ‘En Camino’, Jeff again regrets too many drugs and returns to a remedial program. Concerned, Addy insists he shouldn’t fly under his own power and takes the bus with him just in case. It’s a doomed and dangerous act, and when he explosively detonates en route, Soe is set upon a wildly meandering and overlapping, backslipping pan-reality path that will change the nature of existence.
Successive stories see Soe move again, and repeatedly and publicly accosted by sentient water. Groob bolts for outer space, discovering forces of trauma and loss becoming the main focus of a bold odyssey where space opera action antics dominate. Back on Earth an Arizona road trip leads Delilah to a rash of monster sightings and missing trailer kids. We’re then brought face-to-faceplate with bereaved custodian and janitorial robot Otis. OT-15. He misses his husband and seeks solace by neglecting his own crucial maintenance whilst studying Buddhism.
Although the main event is paused, there are still bunches of bonus stuff to enjoy, beginning with ‘Knitting Patterns’ including dauntingly detailed plans for constructing such soft machines as ‘Soe’s Dipped Mittens’, ‘Casimir’s Balaclava’, and ‘Hulder Mitts’. It’s backed up by a cartoon ‘Afterword’ appreciating the efforts and existence of Professor Chase Hutchison.
Exuberant, graphic, joyous creativity, tinged with trippy counterculture tribute act energy, this initial serving of Infinite Wheatpaste matches Road Warriors with life coaching and coffee with the outer cosmos in the way Red Dwarf might meet Kafka in San Francisco during the (Indian) Summer of Love. Of course they’d all go for tea and biscuits… and so could you whilst unleashing your inner comics muse.
