Review by Win Wiacek

This second volume from self-publishing wizard/minicomic genius John Pham and Fantagraphics Books is once more crafted in an immaculately designed landscape-format tome, printed in quirky two-tone, this time orange and blue and their assorted combinations. As in Sublife 1, it features another series of seemingly unconnected tales linked more by sensibility and tone rather than content.

After a faux newspaper strip ‘Mort’ examines the passions of a failed blogger, the main experience begins with a continuation of the cover-featured ‘Deep Space’, wherein extraordinarily pedestrian star-farers strive to find their way home. It’s a beautifully rendered piece reminiscent of a wistful and less energetic Philippe Druillet. Following that, the author’s exploration of the frankly peculiar residents of 221 Sycamore St resumes. This time runaway teen Phineas sees a disturbing side to his cool uncles when they all go dog-training.

This leads into the anti-elegiac autobiographical memoir ‘St. Ambrose 1984-1988’ before the majority of the volume is taken up with ‘The Kid’, a practically wordless post-apocalyptic science fiction tale of scavenging and the price of love. Yet it’s deeply reminiscent of – and respectful to the movie Mad Max, with just a touch of A Boy and his Dog thrown in, all drawn in a pencil-toned style both deeply poignant and powerfully gripping.

The volume closes with the nostalgic one-pager ‘Socko Sarkissian’, a fond memoriam to baseball’s greatest fictional Armenian batsman.

Seductive, authentically plebeian and surreal by turns, Pham’s work is abstract, symbol-stuffed and penetratingly real. He tells strange stories in comfortable ways and makes the bizarre commonplace without ever descending to histrionics: like a cosmic witness to everything you might or might not want to see.

These quietly compulsive and innovative stories will refresh your visual palate, but sadly Pham moved on and there is no Sublife 3.