09 May / Frontier #7: SexCoven by Jillian Tamaki
After yesterday’s SuperMutant Magic Academy, here’s a Jillian Tamaki bonus for non-kiddie readers. It’s lucky #7 in rebel San Francisco-based publisher Youth in Decline’s Frontier, “a quarterly art and comics monograph series,” as described on the company’s website. “Inspired in part by South Korea’s SSE Project and in part by DC Comics ‘Solo’ series, each issue will highlight exciting and challenging new work by a single artist.”
Tamaki starts off the first of 2015’s Frontier foursome with SexCoven, a 32-page standalone story about the trials and tribulations of experiencing true meaning … sort of. On July 26, 1996, a certain “untitled folder” mysteriously appears on computer desktops. “In its first three years online, it was downloaded only a handful of times.”
Then in 1999, a 17-year-old senior found the folder, gave it a new name – SexCoven, “I’m not sure why I chose that name! Sounded dark and edgy. Cool. Which I definitely was not in high school,” he would later confess – and began sharing the single MP3 contained within. The “wordless, six-hour atonal drone,” was deemed “so profound that each chord shift [felt] like a new tear in the Universe.” Of course, it went viral … led by teens and their covencrawls, pseudo-governed by the invisible Covenhead.net. The nameless Tech tried to explain the “SexCoven Effect” … but who could truly understand?
Fast forward to Joshua Tree, 2012 … where SexCoven still lingers. So what happens now? Can the internet give you answers? Can you experience truth virtually? Can we create lasting community? Who can tell you why?
You need to know, right? That’s why you’ll have to pick up lucky #7!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2015