Mirko Ilić: Nightmares And Daydreams – AC 2020 book review: Lockdown’s darkest dreams
A wordless chronicle of lockdown’s claustrophobia, uncertainty and surreal dislocation
Bosnia’s fabled comic book artist and graphic designer presents a collection of wordless single-page visual essays, journalling the realities (and surrealities) of living through the covid pandemic in New York, his adoptive city. With a career that spans decades, from his early years producing work for Marvel’s Epic Illustrated through to his role as art director for Time magazine’s international edition, Ilic uses his first-love medium of comics as a panacea against the uncertainty and claustrophobia of lockdown.
The idea that the pandemic could be represented as a monochromatic gradient of emotions is central to the visual style and inherent sensibility of the book. Using the technique of chiaroscuro (literally the contrasted effect of light and shadow), Ilic marks out his experiences as self-contained vignettes, sequential and standalone. Each page uses the comic book’s boxed-in format to communicate separation, physical disjointedness and the passing of time. By compartmentalising natural emotions and human desire, he nails down the monotony of covid’s unnatural daily routines, as well as the twin horrors of cooped-up claustrophobia and New York’s wide open, deserted landscape.
A forest turns into the legs of a monstrous pack of wolves, nature chasing us down and sinking its teeth in. Elsewhere, even his bed, that most primal fortress of comfort and safety, retreats into the floor like a grave. People endlessly fall, or disappear altogether, as their personalities are swallowed up by the very streets they walk upon. Nightmares And Daydreams works as an act of defiance, an artist’s compulsion to document the unprecedented.
Nightmares And Daydreams: AC 2020 is published by SelfMadeHero on Thursday 3 September; picture: Primož Korošec.