Review: Pheobe

Review by David Ferguson

Art by Sarah Cunningham
Written by Sarah Cunningham

I don’t want to be ever accused of focusing too much on the bigger names or the more well known Irish books but, while I was at the Dublin Zine Fair, I realised I was kind of overlooking that area of Irish Comics. While at the fair, I picked up a copy of Sarah Cunningham’s new book Phoebe and felt I needed to review it. One to encourage other people with comic zines to come forward and get their books reviewed and two because I think it is a very well but together piece of work. The book tells the story of Phoebe, a cockatoo, who ends up getting lost. It is told in the form of a poem and is cute all ages tale. What I feel is the strength of the book is the design work where things like trees in the background become a little bit more menacing as the character becomes more and more lost. You can have deep and meaningful works of fiction but sometimes you want a nice entertaining story. That’s not to say that this story doesn’t have a deep meaning all of its own. Read it and see what you think.