Astroid

Keiichi Koike is a Japanese artist best known for the drug-soaked science fiction of Ultra Heaven, and Astroid is one of his short wordless pieces, a trip through space and deep time with no dialogue at all. There's no real plot to summarize: it's a visual sequence that moves through cosmic scale, the end of the world folding into its beginning. Koike draws in a tradition closer to Moebius and Otomo than to mainstream manga, dense and detailed and built to disorient. It's closer to an experimental short film on paper than a conventional story, and it's meant to be looked at as much as read. Brief, strange, and entirely about the image.