Minor Leagues # 5
Simon Moreton, 66 pgs (with enclosed bonus 22-page zine),
smoo-comics.com, £5
Minor Leagues, from Bristol’s Simon Moreton, hits is fifth issue with this over-sized zine. It’s A4! It’s enormous! It’s great!
Celebrating two years of Minor Leagues, the fifth issue contains comics and writing from Moreton as a series of photographs. The obvious comparison to make with Moreton’s work is John Porcellino, with the loose and sparse panels falling very much into the comics-as-poetry camp. That’s not meant as a detraction of Moreton’s work though, as that comparison really only begins and ends on a surface level. The sparse and quiet moments that comics depict are deeply relatable.
The quiet of the woods, the almost faceless memories of childhood, the frenzied moments of smoking up in a car and the introspection that follows. Likewise, the writing in the zine is of quiet reminiscence. It gently asks about how our bodies change, and how “ghosts” of the past might hang over our heads. If I have any gripe with this issue of Minor Leagues, it’s that the photographs, for all their thematic connection to the rest of the zine, contrast with the comics in a way that I didn’t find particularly pleasing. The harsh photo-copied blacks were too heavy of a contrast to the whites in the comics. The “burned-out” nature of the manner in which they were produced is at odds with the rest, I guess, and it becomes a little bit distracting.
That said, the one-person anthology is a difficult thing to do, and Moreton once again does it exceptionally.