Puddles - Tomas Cisternas

Puddles by Tomás Cisternas, translated from the Spanish by Michelle Alperin and Stefan Lorenzutti / 120-page paperback with flaps, 6.25 x 7.8 inches, published in 2024 by Bored Wolves (Poland) / ISBN 9781937541248

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“From the moment I originally discovered them, I fell in love with Tomás’ comics. They are lonesome, joyous, plainspoken, infinite.” —John Porcellino

“I appreciate the attention Tomás pays to the quieter moments—raindrops passing through a lamppost’s cone of light or slipping through a dense canopy of leaves; how his gorgeous linework evokes the very thing he is experiencing; and how his generous perspective opens the reader to the shades of beauty around us at all times.” —Ellen O’Grady

In Santiago, Chile, at his drawing table in the evening, beneath raindrops cozily tapping the roof, selecting from his panoply of pens, grounding himself by touching fingertips to paper fibers, inhaling before getting devoutly down to his meaningful mark-making, Tomás Cisternas has for seasons both sought and shared solace through his comics.

Cisternas’ one-page comics, around which this collection was edited, are poetic puddles, distillations of great lakes as concise as they are expansive. Whether sedentary or ambulatory, these autobiographical scenes are paced to a roaming equal parts restless and romantic. Even when he’s hunched over a page at home, Cisternas is somewhere else: a hillside, a forest, on the shores of a small pond chock-full of Bashō’s frogs; on the shores of a potentially bottomless puddle; on the inverted three-quarter shores of a coastal cloudscape with its pearly capes and coves.

The ambulatory comics often begin in the Chilean capital, where Cisternas lives with his family, before drifting across the wildland-urban interface the artist benevolently trespasses on his way to the billboard-less balm of the countryside, with its amphibious encounters, sensory portals to formative childhood memories, and, within the context of a skinny country, enough night sky to make eye contact with the cosmos.