Amateur Hour 01 is a tight collection of short comics and drawings and is the first instalment of Chris Kohler’s new solo anthology. Kohler uses this space to further develop his experimentation with storytelling, picking up the work he started in some of his previously published short comics: Living Room (O Panda Gordo, 2017), Cymbal Crash (self-published, 2017), and Recent Translations 3 (self-published, 2017).

Switching between clear cut narratives and more conceptual and idiosyncratic pieces, Kohler manages to keep an admirable consistency throughout. Different comics in Amateur Hour 01 seem to be dialoguing in a way that is never made clear to the reader as they seem to be speaking their own language, connected by an intrinsic logic that contributes to creating and sustaining a mysterious, quizzical atmosphere.

You may leave Amateur Hour 01 feeling that there is something going on in these 32 pages that you could’t completely understand just like the characters in these stories never seem to be in control or even aware of the complex systems, both social and biological, that shape their destinies.

Chris Kohler is a visual artist, graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer based in Glasgow, Scotland.