2 out of 5

Uli Oesterle’s work in Brain Songs, a collection of 5 short comic-form tales, has bits, visually, from Francesca Germandi, in its blend of surrealism with cartoonish characters, or Teddy Kristiansen, with its dreamlike, angular, shifting geometry, or perhaps – most directly – Ted McKeever, with its thick linework and Picasso-y perspectives.  It doesn’t, visually, have much of an identity of its own outside of this blend, which I generally acknowledge as a criticism in itself: If you only look like or sound like other things, your work, by definition, is not very defining.

Which isn’t to say that the artwork is bad, as these are all wonderfully inventive sources to pluck from, and Oesterle’s application is well-done  for the most part, the beats – maybe more so in the later stories, with the first couple entries going for more complex, and not always successful, arrangements – clearly elucidated and in sync with the narrative.  But still, there’s nothing visually that doesn’t look like something else.

To the content: I kept reading, led on by the promise of some off-kilter ideas and the feeling that the story I’d just read wasn’t bad, so maybe the next one would be better?  And then I hit the back cover.  In part, this is Uli being too clever, whether it’s the Identity-esque layering of the opening mental patient’s monologue, or the random world-building terminology that gets stuffed into the side details of several stories, Brain Songs comes across as sort of trying too hard to be unique.  When it’s simpler – although I hate tribute-type strips that require you to like what’s being tributed to “get” it – such as on the Tom Waits lyric-scored strip Four Minutes Fourtysix, or the straight-forward parable of The Invisible, the work is enjoyable, and starts to hint at its own identity.  But elsewhere Uli clutters it with too many extras, to the point where its hard to conclude what the point was.  Ooh, and all the stories are connected.  Spooooky.  (i.e. Unnecessary.)

The printing, from German publisher Briles, is fine, a squarish-size with cheap but thick off-white stock, but the translation (from German) feels a little wonk, and none of the sound effects get translated, which I understand is tough, because they’re part of the artwork, but many of the stories rely on sound, so it also hiccups the flow.

I purchased this off a sale rack because it looked interesting at a glance.  Going beyond that glance, it doesn’t really establish itself, though that are now works from over a decade ago (’98 – ’99), and there’s at least enough of a scent of intrigue remaining to see if Uli evolved his talents since.