While so many authors are being labelled as “cartoonists”, it would be quite narrow-minded not to look beyond this supposedly less formalized area and think about artists who could contribute to the peculiar object that PFC is – in order to find something in return.
We discovered Jessica Seamans’ work almost randomly on the Internet and immediately figured how talented and solid she was as an illustrator. “Like many others,” one might – at first – be tempted to say. Then a few months later, we had a stroke of luck: At the time of our stay in Minneapolis (in 2013 for the 4th edition of Pierre Feuille Ciseaux), we met Jessica very briefly during the 1st Autoptic Festival (a convention that focuses on a specific alternative comics scene in the US). Jessica Seamans is also one of the co-founders (notably with the precious Dan Black) of Landland : A tiny but awesome silkscreening studio located in the Midwest since late 2007. Their collaborations and their creative as well as technical exchanges, in the immense variety of prints shown there (gig posters, thematic posters, film posters, record covers, etc.), were particularly impressive in the narrative power of the author’s creations.
Jessica Seamans presents herself as an illustrator and a screen printing artist. She produced very, very little material that could be described as straightforward comics, to say the least. But those who follow her work are already well aware of the significant extent of her extremely narrative drawings, whose conception divides them into several types of infra-sequences that reflect each other. Her style tells as much as it illustrates, the lines she draws seem to belong to the same long history whose fragments she partially reveals. Her books carry within them as many complementary elements to each other, just as a sentence is composed of words. It makes you wonder what a comic strip by Jessica Seamans might look like.
Online : landland.net
Bibliography :
• “A Brief Sampling of Cryptids, Folkloric Beasts & Mythological Animals” The Little Otsu Living Things Series, #8, 2012.
