Zenith – Maria Medem
Zenith – Maria Medem / ISBN 9781912278251 / 120-page hardback, 7.25 x 9.5 inches, published by Centrala Books (UK)
(Stocking copies of this book has been an ordeal and may continue to be.)
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Under an ever-present orange sun illuminating a desert landscape, two artisans, one for glass the other for clay, meet every day for lunch and chat. Both are sleepwalkers, but experience this phenomenon in drastically different ways. The potter hates his somnambulism, considers it an uncomfortable part of his being as if he shared a body with a stranger. The glassblower, however, is not nearly as bothered by being a sleepwalker. One night, he wakes up startled. Taken over by insomnia, he goes to his workshop and there he will make a horrifying discovering that will trigger the conclusion of this story.
With an evocative colour palette ranging from deep blue to bright orange that will certainly remind one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of the desert, enigmatic landscapes and atmospheres reminiscent of Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, Zenith is a book that gets under one’s skin and gets to the reader on a deeper, beyond rational level.
María Medem (Seville, 1994) began to self-publish her comics after completing her degree in Fine Arts. She published her first long comic with Terry Bleu, a small Dutch publisher. She has participated in anthologies such as NOW (Fantagraphics Books) and Cold Cube 004 (Cold Cube Press) and even created an album artwork for Bombay Bicycle Club’s ‘ Eat, Sleep, Wake’ record. She regularly collaborates with various publications such as Medium, the New York Times, Wired or Anxy magazine. She participated in the event The City in Comics in Madrid with a large format mural comic.
