Grand Electric Thought Power Mother is a collection of Lale Westvind's critically acclaimed risograph comics, available for major distribution for the first time, with new work. This highly influential body of work is comprised of epic stories with spiritual themes. Poetic and intellectual, the content explores the line between thoughts and reality and perception, the nature of energy and consciousness, collective consciousness and experience, and how will and intent can create collective action. It all plays out in narratives of women warriors literally battling and wrestling through these states and concepts against science fiction, mythological and psychic backdrops.
Muscular women warriors fill the pages with their energy, power, speed, force, gravity, and weight. This powerful collection fills a space for physically and psychologically strong female characters that is rarely occupied in our culture or comics as a whole.
The artwork includes paintings, drawings and illustrated renderings of stills taken from Westvind's video work, primarily in black and white, with cover art and some interior panels in three colors. Comics included in this collection: Now and Here, Other Way, Trial One, Tornar and Riparna; Double Head Tour, Yazar and Arkadas, and Mary.
This is the birthing of an entire cast of truly original characters, the likes of which Marvel and DC have not imagined. These are stories which are queer in their essence. They seek to describe that which does not exist yet. Within these tales are countless new technologies, philosophies, creatures and beings; A treasure trove of new ideas. The author sought to explore the idea that thought has an effect on one's surroundings. To explore the beginning of the cosmos. Thought as a force unto itself. Intention as a force of energy to be controlled.
Grand Electric Thought Power Mother reads like the found spiritual scripture of an alien world.
About the Author: Author Lale Westvind is an artist living in Philadelphia. She is an Ignatz Award winner and one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary comics artists, known for her risograph comics, paintings and drawings. Her work has been compared to that of Jack Kirby and Fletcher Hanks. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been published in Best American Comics, Kramer's Ergot, Smoke Signal, Arthur, Strapazin, and others. Westvind won the Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent in 2012 for Hot Dog Beach #2 and was nominated for the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic in 2012 and 2013.
Editor Kim Jooha is a comics critic and editor, living in Canada. She writes for the Comics Journal and her own blog, Good Comics by Kim. She co-edited 2018's Vanishing Perspective by Alexis Beauclair with Bill Kartalopolous.
