Lemonade Parts 1-3 Review - A Minimalist, Heartbreaking Apocalypse Told in Three Short Chapters

How about a dark, sad story of searching for lemons in the apocalypse that's as short as it is hard-hitting and special in art that has a haunting beauty? You'll want Lemonade Parts 1, 2 & 3 by Mat Martin and Jean-Côme.

Mat Martin is a videographer and writer from Plymouth. The Ducksters quoting indie comics supporter also has a new project named Cola in the works.

Jean-Côme is a French illustrator and comic book artist based in Berlin. Previous works include the beautiful ink and watercolour Extinct, Dirks Soundtrack, Hazelnuts comics magazine cover, An Earth Journal, Fileuses De Soie, and Fliegengewicht, to name a few. Talents trumpeted, on with the review.

So, let's start with the art. Jean-Côme has a very delicate, loose, sparing ink style that captures the rawness of an apocalyptic land to great effect. There's some good character work on offer, with the silhouette and overall look working best. The emotional work is decent and reads well with a particularly sparse and sparing presentation. There's an efficiency to the art I really appreciate, being able to convey so much with so few lines. The landscapes cover this best, evoking a great feeling of hopelessness and end times.

The colour work in all three parts is really interesting as well. Utilising an essentially monochromatic colour scheme in each part with purple, blue and green respectively. The added detail of yellow, almost a symbol of hope or safety, makes a striking visual on already interesting eye candy. The bleakness of the developing narrative is conveyed through the art with clever choices and strong effects. Decently strong art addressed, onto the story.

Mat Martin, in three parts, totalling only twelve pages, manages to convey a short, special, hard-hitting, heartbreaking, sad, dark tale of a father and daughter facing the end times. There's some clever analogy on offer here, I think. With the old saying of "when life gives you lemons", and the idea that maybe in life, sometimes you'd do anything just to have lemons, or some such thought experiment. What there is for sure is a harrowing tale of survival and trying to find hope while shielding the ones we wish to protect. The strength of the sadness presented has a real beauty in it. Though with its bleakness, just leave your hopefulness and notions of happy endings elsewhere. In short, it's short and bleak but powerfully told.

For fans of the apocalypse, short stories, survival, wastelands, fathers making promises for extraordinary lengths to protect their daughters from hostile environments and hidden horrors spurned on by poor recycling, lemons, clever use of colours and art that conveys the hopelessness in a strongly convicted presentation, you can find Lemonade Parts 1, 2 & 3.

To get your copies, the best place to go is here. Where you can purchase all the parts in a physical print format.

Review: 4.2/5