Well, this is nice.

One of the great advantages of the comic medium is the fact that narrative is not essential. No other medium is better able to capture a moment and present it as complete unto itself. I’m talking about things like Harvey Pekar’s work here, or Jerry Moriarty’s sublime Jack Survives. In these works we see strips that couldn’t be said to contain a story, but still manage to capture the essence of something – to capture an idea, a feeling.

Catherine Leamy’s 2005 third issue of her title Geraniums and Bacon is a great example of this kind of comic. Of the nine shorts strips contained within its covers only one has any real semblance of a traditional narrative, but in some ways her strips are all the better for this. Her subjects ranges from night classes to lesbian pornography, with poetry and computer code in between.

At her best Leaming manages to capture the awkward moments where we are surprised by our own imagination, as in the sublime “Thoughts from the Midnight Service” in which the nameless protagonist catches herself comparing church architecture to the structure of the clitoris, much to her own discomfiture. There is a beat as she recognises the absurdity of the thought in her own head that catches the moment beautifully.

This less-is-more philosophy comes undone with the last and longest story in the comic, “Kitty Goes to the Movies”, which stretches a thin premise over 5 pages and then has the audacity to claim that “bad experiences make for really good stories”. Not in this case, I’m afraid.

Still, this is the one weak point in an otherwise strong collection, which features nice clean art throughout, and is unashamed to show its feelings in public. Find out more at www.metrokitty.com. You can buy the comic there for two yankee dollars.