| Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | PO Press/Floating World |
| Format | Ongoing series |
| Genre | Alternative, horror |
| Publication date | 2018 |
| No. of issues | 1 |
| Creative team | |
| Written by | Al Columbia |
| Artist(s) | Al Columbia |
| Editor(s) | Al Columbia |
Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow Supplementary Newsletter No. 1 is a 2018 comic book by Al Columbia. Printed in an oversize 11" x 13" format, it is a 24-page collection of posters allegedly created for animated cartoons by the (fictional) titular director/producer and his company, Podsnap Studios. Some of the "lost films" feature Columbia's recurring protagonists Seymour Sunshine and Knishkebibble the Monkey-Boy, who are depicted here as cartoon characters performed by voice actors. The posters also contain references to earlier Columbia stories such as "The Trumpets They Play!" and "I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool", presenting them as Longfellow's creations and tying them into Amnesia's fictional universe.
Published by Portland, Oregon's Floating World Comics (in association with Columbia's own PO Press) accompanied by a fictional backstory and a blurb from Art Spiegelman,[1] Amnesia was well received by critics, who praised both the artwork and its conceptual underpinnings. Matt Seneca wrote in The Comics Journal that it "spotlights a cartoonist who has identified exactly what's most powerful about his own work building himself an elaborate metafictional theater to project it in."[2] Heidi MacDonald compared it favorably to Seth's It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken and Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye as "an elaborately invented body of work for an imagined creator."[3] In a conference presentation at William Peace University[4] later published in book form, Chadwick Crawford considered Amnesia's metafictional conceit as a further development of ideas explored in Columbia's previous book, 2009's Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days.[5] The Guardian included it in a 2019 overview of the best comics of the decade.[6]
- ^ "Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow by Al Columbia". Floating World Comics. Archived from the original on 2019-12-31. Retrieved 2021-10-16.
- ^ Seneca, Matt (Oct 31, 2018). "Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow". The Comics Journal. Archived from the original on 2021-05-15.
- ^ MacDonald, Heidi (November 2, 2018). "Al Columbia has a new comic and it's, predictably, weird". comicsbeat.com. Archived from the original on 2018-11-02. Retrieved 2021-10-16.
- ^ PEACEIC Program Information peace.edu
- ^ Crawford, Chadwick. "Narrative Fragmentation in Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie". In Exploring the Macabre, Malevolent, and Mysterious: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Matthew Hodge and Elizabeth Kusko. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. 186.
- ^ Thielman, Sam (2019-12-31). "Sandman to Hark! A Vagrant: the best comics of the decade". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media. Archived from the original on 2021-07-29. Retrieved 2021-10-16.