Walker Tate’s comics have a way of clinging in the back of your mind and staying there for extended periods — and given that this is the second of his works I’ve reviewed in the past week or so (the other being his most recent, Cloggel, the cover of which appears at the bottom of this review as a friendly reminder for you to, ya know, buy it), you can safely surmise that they’ve been clawing their way to the forefront of mine in recent days. And so they have. This is largely down to the fact that they lend themselves to careful consideration, as you’ve no doubt guessed, but they just as surely eschew immediate interpretation and classification, instead going the slow-burn route of conceptual percolation, for lack of a better term, until the reader finally either has a “Eureka!” moment or, more likely, achieves a kind of temporary detente with the work, a state of qualified understanding that comes part and parcel with a secondary understanding of its own — that being that you reserve the right to re-examine your examination of it at a later date and, if needs be, scrap some or all of what you thought in favor of a new perspective. Or series of them. I know, I know — this is getting complicated.

In point of fact, though, Tate’s 2018 (I think?) self-published comics ‘zine that I’m attempting to review here, Waiting Room, starts out pretty complicated from the jump, although its appearance would clearly and understandably lure you into believing it’s anything but at first glance. Always a “clean line” minimalist, this book represents Tate at his most abstract and most confident simultaneously, his economy of lines so expertly deployed that no room is offered for the extraneous either in the concrete or the abstract, and an implicit agreement is broached with readers from page one that a lot of the “heavy lifting” with this thing is going to be their responsibility.

Which isn’t to say there’s not a fairly easy narrative through-line to follow here about a guy who gets fed up waiting somewhere for something and sets off a wave of destruction in his frustrated wake. But it’s destruction tempered, more by accident than design, with deconstruction, and carries within it the seeds of a new wave of creation that will necessarily follow suit after. The multi-faceted approach the comic takes in communicating all this is pretty impressive in and of itself — Tate privileges inanimate objects every bit as much as he does people, and positions both in space in a highly considered manner that is as precise as it is poetic — but it’s the deceptive simplicity of this visual language that keeps you as off-balance as anything else on offer here, and trust me when I say that “anything else on offer” encompasses a hell of a lot. But I’ve either established that much already, or I haven’t done my job correctly.

The “waiting room ritual” is a constant source of frustration in modern life, of course, so this work starts with a pretty damn universally-understood premise, but where it goes from there is an intriguing blend of the mundane with the absurd, a delicate balance between the two on occasion see-sawing from the one toward the other and vice-versa in accordance with the cartoonist’s creative imperatives until one fully gives way to the other — but which is it? I’m not being coy here, or avoiding “spoilers,” or what have you — I’m legitimately informing you that discerning between the two is not so easy a task once all is said and done.

Although, hey — even the term “done” is a relative one here. Yeah, the comic ends after 20 pages, but as I stated at the outset, this thing keeps working its way into, and around within, your mind for a good long while afterwards, its “staying power” at the least belying, perhaps even transcending, its exquisitely austere origins. “Nothing ends, Adrian — nothing ever ends.”

And why should a comic this good? Open to a near-limitless number of analyses and evaluations — and at the very least giving you plenty of food for thought the next time you’re waiting for your number to come up at the DMV — this isn’t just one of those books you’ll never forget, it’s one that reads as something very nearly entirely new every time.

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Waiting Room is available for $7.00 from Austin English’s Dmino Books distro at http://dominobooks.org/waitingroom.html

Also, this review — and all others around these parts — is “brought to you” by my Patreon site, where I serve up exclusive thrice-weekly rants and ramblings on the worlds of comics, films, television, literature, and politics for as little as a dollar a month. Subscribing is the best way to support my ongoing work, so do please take a moment to check it out by directing your kind attention to https://www.patreon.com/fourcolorapocalypse