Indigo Vertigo is one of those rare comics where the words and images intersect as one, not standing apart as separate organs in the same creature but bleeding, literally and figuratively, into each other with desperate, hectic energy. A young woman's brutal, beautiful, haunting and disjointed struggle against the unseen has been splashed in jet blacks and wet, throbbing grays across every page. She is alternately grungy and unsullied, clear and bleary, defiant and desperate.

The plot is poetry and dub, rhythmic, distant language spilling between filthy white lace.

Indigo Vertigo isn't so much a comic book as it is the most electrifying and heart-rending sort of trip-hop torn from the audio world and smashed defiantly onto the page. Silent music.

Because it is so deliciously disjointed, Indigo Vertigo demands not only that you read it in one sitting -- there is no escape route from Garside's words, and Schaffer provides you no doorways back out into the light -- it also demands you to listen, as one would to obscure and gorgeous lyrics, over and over again to find that one hook to draw you in and shine light into your hungry eyes.

Review by Matt Phillon.

What happens when you mix indy comics Dogwitch creator Dan Schaffer with indy rocker KatieJane Garside of Queenadreena? A graphic novel called Indigo Vertigo. The 48 page one shot hits stores this August from Image. Of the one-shot, Shaffer said, "Indigo Vertigo doesn’t follow any standard comic books rules. It wasn’t created with the usual method; it was approached from the inside out, from the bottom up. Each panel is a scramble for the next breath, for the next meaning. Each word is an intimate confession. The story, the concept, the context, these things all happen between the layers."

"Why would Katiejane and I create a book that’s out on the edge of all that is right and good and proper in comics?" Schaffer posed. "What’s with the dark acid trip art, and why the ambiguous title? Why would we intentionally not play the game?"

He said the answers are because the pair wanted to go against the conventional comic book stereotype. "Let’s take a look at the game," Shaffer said. "What comics do is this - they communicate the experience of being human. There’s more to it, obviously, but that’s the bottom line. And like every other form of art, they do it in a variety of imaginative and meaningful ways. Whether it’s achieved with superheroes or spacemen or, in the case of Indigo Vertigo, with a single nameless character doing her thing against a backdrop of trippy visual metaphors, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter because it's always all about the honesty, and Indigo Vertigo does not pretend to be anything more than a brutally honest book. The proof is in the title. It’s the essence of the book, ambiguous in its duality, but decipherable, and ultimately honest. So, listen, the only game we’re not playing here is the 'formula' game."

"Indigo Vertigo is an attempt to connect to the reader by acknowledging the demons and empty spaces that are within everybody," continued Schaffer. "If you’re going to do something like that without pretension or agenda, you have to first expose the same thing from within yourself, and so this book is a glimpse of that truth, from the perspective of both Katie and myself, with a little bit of space for the reader. It’s a book designed to reach out through example, and it will come alive if you bring something of yourself to it."

Also keep checking back with THE PULSE for a longer interview with Dan Schaffer about this project.

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