FORMING

When assigned to write about Jesse Moynihan's serialized weekly epic Forming a couple days ago, I promptly lost myself in an irritating Adaptation style metatextual hell of drifting mystical staircases and mental distortions. Happily, this frustrating process says as much about Forming's many great attributes as narrative as my own brain's exasperating echo park.



In the interest of clarity and setting personal failings aside, here's a brief list of observations and thoughts:

1. Forming is a great title. The word itself is a gerund which means a verb that acts like a noun, or to put it pseudo-poetically: movement frozen. Besides the nerdiness factor, this is a beautiful way to describe a narrative that is literally about creation. It speaks to the infinite and eternal as belonging to the newly born. Or: action being stasis.

2. The fact that Noah's communion with Ain Soph - a confusing Kabbalistic idea of God as pure limitlessness - involves visions of a vomiting Garbage Pail Kid seems appropriately in touch with the absurdity of the infinite.



3. Consistent, rigid grid and black outlines over murkier gouache emphasize the theme of forms, of separating objects, which reminds me of conflict, which is the whole point of storytelling. Becoming and undoing, etc.

4. Really enjoy the shifting sympathies. So many overlapping mythologies crash into each other here that reader identification constantly changes. Do we like the rather PC black Adam and Eve, the neurotic alien techno-bureaucrat Nommo, Serapis the Androgyne, or Michael, the reluctant blue angel? As with any excited collision of ideas, characters, and forces, discerning sincerity from deception, or purity from corruption is a nearly impossible task. Perhaps that's what forming is anyway, the constant upheaval of the old for the new. An endless process that we try to stay on top of as artists and as humans.

Despite our most crybaby emo efforts though, chaos is funny.