Last year I stumbled across some books published by Conundrum Press, a great Canadian comics publisher. They are celebrating 25 years of publishing comics with their series Conundrum25. I reviewed Post-Modern Mini-Comics and several other volues in this series in December. The publisher of Conundrum, Andy Brown, explained the series like so, “The idea is to get 25 books (so 5/year) and in 2026 collect them into a box set.” Each volume is formatted the same, so that when the boxed set is published, they’ll all fit. The books are small—the trim size is 4 1/2” x 6 1/2”. Many are published one-panel per page. They are books, but in terms of how much information they deliver to the reader, they are often more like short stories. What follows are capsule reviews of six of the Conundrum25 series.
The Conundrum25 books tend to be pretty sparse, story-wise. They have about as much information as an old school comic book off the spinner rack, and they take about as long to read. But they collectively form a fantastic overview of the Canadian small-press comics scene. The Water Lover by Patrick Allaby is one of these, a short fiction in which a young college student discovers he has type 1 diabetes. This awareness takes a long time to dawn on him—the first symptom he has is intense thirst. Indeed, he starts to arrange his life around where the water fountains are in his college. He starts losing weight, getting so weak that a walk to school is almost impossible. Finally after a bad night of vomiting, he ends up in the hospital. He has to change his lifestyle. He must pay a shocking amount of money for insulin and the cost of using a blood sugar device—which shocks the protagonist, as it did me. I thought Canada paid for all that stuff. Meanwhile, the main character’s obsession with Prince, the pop star, snakes through the story, forming a parallel narrative. The art is fairly basic—it tells the story, but not much more. Like several books in the series, it features one illustration per page, with text below.
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