More recently, ‘Black Box’ (issue 5, 2016) performed a material evocation of concealment and subterfuge, the magazine itself resembling some kind of reconnaissance hardware employed in extra-governmental espionage. Notably, the flagship issue deployed a vivid two-colour assault that appeared to vaporize from the page like a fluorescent orange fog. It’s a technique that has allowed the editors to draw otherwise invisible threads between content that may not have such an initially evident connection. In an attempt to avoid the sometimes disjointed feel of other anthologies, Mould Map has frequently employed a strikingly limited colour palette and made infrequent concessions to a formal design language in order to create fluidity between stylistically disparate submissions. You can trace this sensibility back through their independent small press activities as Landfill Editions and Famicon Express respectively, with Frost having previously focused on limited-run books with Ned Beauman, Bill Cotter, Adam Higton and Jaakko Pallasvuo, and Sadler having been consistently at the forefront of British comics, publishing innovative work by Hardeep Pandhal, Stefan Sadler and Jonathan Chandler, the United Kingdom’s ‘most isolated cartoonist’. What Mould Map has staked as its own territory, however, is a peculiar milieu of speculative thought that the editors refer to as the ‘background hum of sci-fi imaginaries’.
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All images courtesy: Hugh Frost & Leon Sadlerįrost and Sadler’s publication exists in a cross-pollinating mycelium of international alt-comics and narrative art, frequently sharing contributors with Sammy Harkham’s irregular survey Kramers Ergot, Jonas Delaborde and Hendrik Hegray’s dark noise graphics periodicals Nazi Knife and False Flag, and writer-curator Dan Nadel’s tragically defunct but hugely influential imprint Picturebox Inc, a platform responsible for publishing such luminaries as Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman and Gary Panter. It’s an approach fully deserving of the weird content frequently selected: jarring stories of alien visitation, desirous automata and inter-planetary existential self-doubt. Subsequent issues have brought about elaborate mutations in form, and flicking through a few copies gives the sense that the editors have long been questioning how certain content collisions or design decisions might affect the most peculiar reading experience.
![terraformers sandra hoffman terraformers sandra hoffman](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/terraformars/images/a/a4/Sandra_with_Eva.png)
As visually expansive as it is politically charged, Mould Map has been a steady blip on my radar since its first issue, an oversized pamphlet that showcased new sequential art and underground graphic work by Brenna Murphy, Christopher Forgues (C.F.), Massimiliano Bomba and Jason Traeger, amongst others, and was proudly printed on ‘100% post-consumer recycled stock’.
![terraformers sandra hoffman terraformers sandra hoffman](https://tributecenteronline.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/Obituaries/19892050/Social.jpg)
‘Sloppy gatekeeping’: that’s how designer Hugh Frost and comic book visionary Leon Sadler have come to describe the editorial approach of Mould Map, a mind flaying magazine of possible worlds that they launched in 2011.