The Three Paradoxes back

Out of all the books I've seen so far this year, this is the most impressive by far. It quite simply refuses to escape my thoughts. With this slim tome, Hornschemeier has accumulated the lessons learned in his previous books, and then surpassed himself. Strange that, considering one of this books many themes is Paul's creative self-doubt and lack of direction in his work - his perceived failure to progress within the medium.

The title is a reference to the three strongest of Zeno's paradoxes, which discredit the notion of progress by pointing out in various ways that between one point and another lie an infinite number of half ways so we never reach our goals. Paul uses them to question the idea of personal and artistic growth. Can the self ever really change, or are we just trapped in a set of repeating loops that create the illusion of growth? Paul is drawing a strip about a boy afraid of the world and is constantly revising the strip. The struggle he has creating something as an artist is reflected in his blue-pencilled self battling with weird monsters, while the "wise guy in the sky" - a Mr. Natural-esque wizard character sitting on a cloud - refuses to actively intervene and help him, instead offering meagre and often confusing advice. He attempts to create this strip at his parents' house, which he's visiting, but finds himself distracted. So when his father takes a walk back to the office (he left the lights on), Paul uses it as an excuse to take a walk also. While strolling with his Father, they catch up on each others' lives with the kind of strange awkward conversation you only really make with family. They're two of the closest people in some respects, but there's a space between them that neither party can traverse - this is how Paul demonstrates how Zeno's paradoxes play an integral part of his life. While walking, intrusive memories of an incident (which his father refused to interfere in) where he was beaten up, partially as a result of his own exaggerations, intersect with the familiar townscape. He uses an OUR GANG cartoony style with a 4-colour palette to set the tangent in the past tense. That style also gets used for an extended daydream about a store clerk he meets with a scar across his neck and also in an amusing take on Zeno himself trying to explain his paradoxes to a befuddled gathering of philosophers.

Using visual tools such as this, Hornschemeier evokes Ware's sense of nostalgia but the most direct comparison would be to Daniel Clowes' fantastic ICE HAVEN. Both use different yet interconnected narratives simultaneously to convey a suitable and subtle emotional tone. But where Clowes brought us detective fiction, Hornschemeier offers an autobiographical (or at least self-referential) story.