Frontier Codec by Turner Williams Jr.

Frontier Codec - Tome 1: Accents of the Landscape Supply

mazed in machinetime / a hayseed is reborn
embowered at last / a last green man returns
to find the oroborealtree of / life after lore

The first volume of an ongoing collage novel, in which Williams riffs on the human appetite for lore and vernacular data. He applies a hand-made, systems-based approach to storytelling that scrambles intricate drawings, cutups and fractured texts into a shuffling, scrolling yarn as iconographic as it is abstract. The book unfolds along the crease between folkloric allegory and the load-bearing jargon of our time. This is storytelling as a manipulation of signal flow. The image and the word, compressed, coded, converted. 

"The images are very powerfully folded in on themselves then open out to a kind of overfull children’s book quality. A sort of naturalness in an obviously fictional context. Animal heads on elaborately clothed human shapes. The snakes. It’s not at all something to escape to. Like "Une Semaine de Bonté" I thought. Becoming more confidently itself, the story was already there and it’s a visual story but the texts are almost like “please don’t touch the pictures” very cold and kind of have a warning quality reminding you of fixed barriers which are themselves at the same time enigmatic and kind of like the tar in the tarbaby story."

- Johnny Coley


44 pages
first edition
handmade

Fringe, USA

sweetwreath.com