Time to pick pomegranates
Cartoonist: Yasmeen Adifard
Sold by: Silver Sprocket / $14.99
September 2024
The deeper you go, the darker and stranger the pomegranate-picking season becomes. It’s certainly a strange book from the start, but a small voice inside an innocent biological science film becomes trapped, twisted, and torn apart. Disgust becomes desire, which creates more disgust, and starts again. This time the teeth penetrate the flesh and tear the fruit, making it buzz and turn sticky. Meaning and emotion are tied together like biting your lip. Yasmeen Abedifard’s graphic novel is sensual, rotten with disgust, and uncomfortably relatable. A series of encounters between two strangers in a garden reflecting the blooming and entropy of a pomegranate fruit?No.
Deciding when to pick pomegranates defies common sense. Stories of shared experiences focus on unnatural impulses and inner turmoil. Scary, everyday conflicts can lead to dark thoughts, distorted fantasies, and anxiety. Disa Wallander and EM Carroll meet. It has moments of the rawness of Sophia Foster-Diminio and the artistic complexity of Michael DeForge. Abedifard shares Wallander’s interest in photography, textured backgrounds, simple characters like Snufkine and philosophical musings. Instead of talking heads in empty squares, there’s an old-school indie comic feel to American Splendor, with Anaru (the pomegranate person) and Guri (the naked woman) floating in space. Each is placed in God’s hands, and He makes them smooth like clay. Close your palms and the story begins.
Ostensibly, this is a series of short comics, each rendered in an appealingly different range of tones to enhance the aesthetic. The misplaced desires of a muse, a rotten type of self-loathing, an encounter with actual hot shit, or twisting a man’s arm until it’s physically torn apart and bled. I think by range you mean from dark to black. That’s the EM Carroll part. A procession of repulsion and desire that continues to sink. The complexity of perspective and elucidation shifts with each encounter.
As each part rearranges the relationship between Anar and Guri, Abedifard dramatically changes the color key of the comic. There are title cards such as “Flower”, “Ripe”, and “Rotten”, but the first two have page colors, the former looks like a glaze on the pebbles of a clay pot, and the latter has fine lines baked into the porcelain. It looks like. The third is the color of a pomegranate, a spent shell and ink drops speckled like mold.
Unsettling and beautiful. Unforgettable. Although it looks like a series, it’s actually a graphic novel with each chapter written in a strikingly different style. The two through-lines are two SF-D-like characters stricken by deep grief, and despite their alien appearances and impossible experiences, they are relatable. And… each story has a darkness that cannot be escaped. When the sun must rise every morning in order to continue and move forward, Anar and Guri continue to doubt, suffer, and yearn. Growth and decline always occur, regardless of the color of the page.
Life is a sad story, isn’t it? The seeds split open and the sprouts twist and emerge from the soil. violence. The flowers fall under their own weight. Sadly, they die even when they are fully grown. What’s worse, after it rots and returns to the soil, it doesn’t rest, but instead gives birth to other seeds. Life never stops. Despite the inner fear (this comic is not life), “Pomegranate” allows the reader to experience pure desire. Fear and desire intertwine and become the basis for the story to blossom.
I find Abedifard’s complex art style very appealing. The composition of shapes and colors has the simplicity of a two-dimensional art or mural. But there’s texture dust everywhere, and blackness sprinkled in like printer toner has been blown across the page. Guri and Anal show a different world wear than the other pages of the comic. Sketchbooks tend to leave small lines that give personality to gestures and emotions. It melts in a lot of sweat. Overall, the art has creative freedom and graffiti experimentation, appearing in spurts of the weird and wonderful. The image itself is chaotic. What is depicted can suddenly and inexplicably mess up, but there are really no rules anywhere.
But it’s also a well-constructed, perfectly measured piece of work. The color scheme of each comic pushes the atmosphere into the realm of giallo aesthetics. Their sequences play each story against the palette before it. Abedifard and Silver Sprocket have put together a deeply satisfying book in which the power of stylized art is inseparable from the effect the object has on the person who holds it. If you get your storytelling wrong, it takes you away from the moment. Pomegranate brings awareness to the moment in a way that enhances the story.
And the intent of Abedifard’s visual presentation is matched by that diversity through the way she tells the story of “When Picking Pomegranates.” For some, the time spent looking at the scenes through the paneled windows and passing through the gutter separating them feels like watching a regular cartoon. Some images are a series of images whose meanings are explained one after the other, like a series of tarot cards arranged in a grid. What floats on the page, a small anal, a small gris. The voice of God, which has no substance, cannot be contained in a box; it floats in the air. So what did you learn?
“Time to Pick a Pomegranate” is available at Silver Sprocket or wherever better comics and books are sold.
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