Review by Frank Plowright

Taking the title from the dense single page opening strip explaining how there are multiple worlds within worlds, this exhaustive anthology combines the work that preceded Julia Gfrörer’s graphic novels alongside strips later published between them. As a unique creator with an extremely individual viewpoint and multiple interests, her shorter material ought to be as fascinating as her longer strips, and so it proves.

Gfrörer’s beat is the cusp of fantasy with horror, exploring dark areas, whether of human emotion or matters beyond, and while some inclusions are clear enough others have a dreamlike lack of logic or explanation. We’re shown what we’re shown, and the interpretation is often down to the reader. What are we to make of ‘Four Thieves’, the single page strip supplied as sample art? This isn’t the usual chronological progression either, the pagination Gfrörer’s own selection, so one of the most recent strips is among the earliest supplied. ‘Pluto’ is wordless and again, make of it what you will. Only the subjugation of a woman is clear, a relatively common theme here.

Perhaps the most unifying theme is bleakness, and darkness is a constant accompaniment, yet it’s a rare inclusion that doesn’t have some sly humour among the darkness, sometimes breaking out into the open as in ‘Frasier Crane Has Left the Building’. It’s a note perfect slapstick homage. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is repurposed as a comic strip in Latin, while ‘The Chasm’ mixes the inexplicable with bawdy sexual content, and there’s plenty more in the overt comedy of a man consulting a witch to reunite with his dead love. A sequel is more concerned with folklore, but graphic sex recurs throughout, another example being Gfrörer’s gleefully perverse sequel to an Edgar Allen Poe tale. That’s in the middle of what could be termed the ejaculate section.

There’s a surprising craft to the art, which at first may seem scratchy and unfocussed, yet on close inspection always makes perfect sense even when Gfrörer’s messing with scale. Some people seem to occupy a defined past via their clothing while others are products of an imaginary era.

Toward the end the mood switches to contemporary, first with the extended disintegration of Jamie and Lauren’s relationship amid artistic frustrations, suspicion and lack of consideration. Will it be complicated or saved by supernatural intrusion? Starting a new section it seems a complete anomaly, yet the themes echo earlier strips, just with despair recontextualised in modern terms. That’s more literally addressed in penultimate strip ‘Tartarus’ where classical allusion is supplied in terms of conceptual art. Are Gfrörer’s sympathies with the misunderstood artist or is the entire strip intended as satirical? As with so much here, the interpretation is yours.

If that makes World Within the World seem a frustration or a challenge, it’s not. It’s a wave of artistic statement to wash over you for later contemplation, sometimes uncertain, sometimes funny, but always of interest.