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Spiral and Other Stories
A delicate, dreamlike, and lushly detailed comics collection by a contemporary artist whose work explores the enmeshment of the human and non-human worlds.
For years, Aidan Koch’s comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, helping reimagine what a comic can look like, and the kinds of stories it can tell.
Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. Spiral and Other Stories is a triumph of that continuing process.
Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit.
Characters yearn for each other, even as they’re pulled toward different lives. Rivers dance together and then diverge as they make their way to see the sea.
With an accompanying essay by the author and critic Nicole Rudick, who explores Koch’s craft and her move into environmentally focused comics, Spiral and Other Stories is a showcase of Koch’s mastery of the form of comics, as a medium that can contain astonishing forms and tell new stories for our uncertain times.
For years, Aidan Koch’s comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, helping reimagine what a comic can look like, and the kinds of stories it can tell.
Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. Spiral and Other Stories is a triumph of that continuing process.
Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit.
Characters yearn for each other, even as they’re pulled toward different lives. Rivers dance together and then diverge as they make their way to see the sea.
With an accompanying essay by the author and critic Nicole Rudick, who explores Koch’s craft and her move into environmentally focused comics, Spiral and Other Stories is a showcase of Koch’s mastery of the form of comics, as a medium that can contain astonishing forms and tell new stories for our uncertain times.
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2024
5 people are currently reading
251 people want to read
About the author
Aidan Koch
40 books59 followersAidan Koch was born in Seattle, WA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in Illustration at the Pacific NW College of Art in Portland, OR, and works in a variety of mediums, often blurring their conventions. Her work has appeared in a variety of group exhibitions, as well as The Paris Review. Past books include the Xeric Award winning The Whale (Gaze Books, 2014), Field Studies (Floating World Comics, 2012) and the anthology Astral Talk (Publication Studio, 2011), which she edited.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
February 14, 2025
LOL! This book is so bad the editor, Nicole Rudick, felt obliged to do damage control with a spin-doctor afterword that invokes the name of much better artists in hopes that their mere proximity to Aidan Koch's name will somehow add a whiff of respectability to the garbage Koch has presented here. Rudick's bullshit hype is what you'd expect from an art gallery sales representative working on commission or a couple of tailors selling the emperor some new clothes.
I mean, how else to explain sentences like these:
• A full picture, literally and metaphorically, is never provided, but Koch gives enough information to allow the reader a sensory impression of setting, action, and character.
• In "The Forest," a figure's enthralled attention to the sky, trees, and water makes the landscape a central protagonist of the story, one whose narrative potential exists beyond the story's ability to capture and hold it.
• Most often, these collaged pieces convey texture and mood over explicit information.
• These sentences read like descriptions of her drawings, offering just enough to envision the scene, or to feel it, but not much more.
In many ways I'm grateful for Rudick's afterword, because it felt good to laugh so hard after suffering through the art and writing that preceded it. Honestly, I wouldn't have been surprised if the afterword explained that Koch was a middle-schooler who won a contest where first prize was having their work published in "a real book." Or if Koch was working in collaboration with a very talented elephant who painted with a brush held in its trunk.
My greatest wish at this point is that this whole book is an elaborate prank by Banksy to see if an enthusiastic afterword that explains the artistry and significance of the work can trick people -- like the critics from the Washington Post below -- into thinking this is actually an artistic and significant work. Please, please, please let it be so!
Anyway, barely-there lines and smears of colors are meant to help tell four short stories. It's hard to tell what the stories are about though since the lettering is practically indecipherable, looking like the scrawls a professional letterer is meant to come in and replace during the book's production. And if you concentrate and decode the text, your prize is a whole lot of drivel.
(Best of 2024 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:
• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2024
• Publishers Weekly 2024 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2024: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels
This book made the Post list.)
I mean, how else to explain sentences like these:
• A full picture, literally and metaphorically, is never provided, but Koch gives enough information to allow the reader a sensory impression of setting, action, and character.
• In "The Forest," a figure's enthralled attention to the sky, trees, and water makes the landscape a central protagonist of the story, one whose narrative potential exists beyond the story's ability to capture and hold it.
• Most often, these collaged pieces convey texture and mood over explicit information.
• These sentences read like descriptions of her drawings, offering just enough to envision the scene, or to feel it, but not much more.
In many ways I'm grateful for Rudick's afterword, because it felt good to laugh so hard after suffering through the art and writing that preceded it. Honestly, I wouldn't have been surprised if the afterword explained that Koch was a middle-schooler who won a contest where first prize was having their work published in "a real book." Or if Koch was working in collaboration with a very talented elephant who painted with a brush held in its trunk.
My greatest wish at this point is that this whole book is an elaborate prank by Banksy to see if an enthusiastic afterword that explains the artistry and significance of the work can trick people -- like the critics from the Washington Post below -- into thinking this is actually an artistic and significant work. Please, please, please let it be so!
Anyway, barely-there lines and smears of colors are meant to help tell four short stories. It's hard to tell what the stories are about though since the lettering is practically indecipherable, looking like the scrawls a professional letterer is meant to come in and replace during the book's production. And if you concentrate and decode the text, your prize is a whole lot of drivel.
(Best of 2024 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:
• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2024
• Publishers Weekly 2024 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2024: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels
This book made the Post list.)
May 19, 2024
Spiral and Other Stories is a collection of short comics by Aidan Koch, all separate narratively but tied together with themes of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Koch exercises a wide array of media to craft the comics here, ranging from watercolors, crayons and collage, all in service of building a dizzying blend of dense details amidst vast emptiness. The sparse dialogue in these stories convey an almost static quality that conveys lengthy silences capably, with occasional bursts of movement achieved by the vivid use of colors. The titular story, "Spiral", serves as the lengthiest feature which focuses on a strained friendship, and a desire to find a direction in life. Interspersed with the central narrative of two women reconnecting is a bird's-eye view of two rivers dancing over miles, diverging and converging in all kinds of ways. The winding nature of the rivers is a direct parallel to the two women in "Spiral", but it also denotes the wildly differentiated timescales of the narratives. A key moment in the story involves the two characters examining an ancient rock dubbed as the "Old Man" which serves to remind the reader how frivolous human events are with respect to the scale that is the natural history of this world.
The pervasiveness of nature continues in the shorter piece entitled "The Forest", whereby a lone figure stands entrenched in the nature about them, undying and ever-patient. It's a poetic little story, which the enduring aspect of the environment serving as its crux. "A New Year" features a fair amount more human characters as we observe a group of tourists learning about the past natural history of a village and the role a tree at its center holds. Though in the end, the closing panels of "A New Year" continue to build on the themes found in both "Spiral" and "The Forest", as the colorful tree stares right back at the reader with not a word exchanged.
The final story is "Mad Made Lake" (previously published in mini kuš! #94), which connects the narrative of a man seeking psychotherapy to deduce previous out-of-body experiences involving past lives. Here Koch deviates the most stylistically, opting for the most diverse blend of art styles seen yet, but still maintaining the use of soft colors and sparse layouts.
Though some might find the simplicity of Koch's linework and hand-lettering to be more on the cruder side, I find the multimedia art style to perfectly capture the ethereal quality that is the world around us. The imprecise spot colors cultivate a dynamic sensibility to the nature around us, with roaring rivers and the trees swaying in the wind to break up the mostly silent settings. Adding to it all is Koch's relatively muted prose which is both intimate and charming, and gives the various stories here their poignancy. This collection is a fantastic sampling of Koch's work, and well worth checking out for just how differentiated these comics are with respect to what this medium has to offer.
The pervasiveness of nature continues in the shorter piece entitled "The Forest", whereby a lone figure stands entrenched in the nature about them, undying and ever-patient. It's a poetic little story, which the enduring aspect of the environment serving as its crux. "A New Year" features a fair amount more human characters as we observe a group of tourists learning about the past natural history of a village and the role a tree at its center holds. Though in the end, the closing panels of "A New Year" continue to build on the themes found in both "Spiral" and "The Forest", as the colorful tree stares right back at the reader with not a word exchanged.
The final story is "Mad Made Lake" (previously published in mini kuš! #94), which connects the narrative of a man seeking psychotherapy to deduce previous out-of-body experiences involving past lives. Here Koch deviates the most stylistically, opting for the most diverse blend of art styles seen yet, but still maintaining the use of soft colors and sparse layouts.
Though some might find the simplicity of Koch's linework and hand-lettering to be more on the cruder side, I find the multimedia art style to perfectly capture the ethereal quality that is the world around us. The imprecise spot colors cultivate a dynamic sensibility to the nature around us, with roaring rivers and the trees swaying in the wind to break up the mostly silent settings. Adding to it all is Koch's relatively muted prose which is both intimate and charming, and gives the various stories here their poignancy. This collection is a fantastic sampling of Koch's work, and well worth checking out for just how differentiated these comics are with respect to what this medium has to offer.
June 24, 2024
Offering vignettes about history, place, companionship, and love, Aidan Koch uses a spare, elliptical style of verbal and visual narration. Aiming for a haiku-like concision in words that frame Koch’s pastel watercolors, gouache, and pencils, her thin, smooth lines remind me of those drawn by Dash Shaw and CF (Christopher Forgues, soon also to be published by NYR Comics). Any number of her panels could double as abstract paintings; it’s the narration that tells us how to see the streams of colors, with just enough hint from the words and images together to fill in the rest. An excellent collection.
As a sidebar, one of the stories here, “Man Made Lake,” was originally published by the Lithuanian comic book publishers of the kuš! and mini-kuš! series, which I’ve reviewed here: (3rd review down) https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
As a sidebar, one of the stories here, “Man Made Lake,” was originally published by the Lithuanian comic book publishers of the kuš! and mini-kuš! series, which I’ve reviewed here: (3rd review down) https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
July 25, 2025
Beautiful use of visual metaphor--makes full use of the medium it exists in to weave together stories that are simple but know exactly what they are. Abstraction lends itself well to this simplicity. The reader is free to interpret between the lines and beyond the image. These stories have a poetic element to them in which they exist in the mind of the reader as much as on the page.
My favorite topic in this collection was animism and spiritual connection to the environment. My favorite story in the collection was Man Made Lake.
I didn't enjoy the afterword and thought that it detracted from the work. Did not bother to read it in full.
My favorite topic in this collection was animism and spiritual connection to the environment. My favorite story in the collection was Man Made Lake.
I didn't enjoy the afterword and thought that it detracted from the work. Did not bother to read it in full.
December 18, 2024
A graphic novel of minimalist short stories with text almost like prose poems. One of my favorite books that I’ve read in 2024. The artwork is gorgeous.
July 28, 2024
Stunning. The text and the art are just enough to guide your experience. I am so impressed my library had this, but I will be buying it for my shelf!
November 30, 2024
Aidan Kich’s collection Spiral & Other Stories (2024) I call art comics, or maybe even poetry comics, imbued with lyrical intent. Minimalist, mostly suggestive of narratives and sometimes resisting them altogether, though sometimes embracing allegory (rivers entwining, as relationships), the totality s lovely, ethereal, elliptical, reflective, with lots of wordless, negative space, using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage.
The loosely linked stories, or sections, include "Spiral," "A New Year," "The Forest," and "Man Made Lake." "Spiral" is the longest one, focusing on a rocky relationship between two women that seems to parallel two winding, sometimes intereseting rivers. The women look at a rock they call "The Old Man," sculpted over centuries. Nature time versus human time. "A New Year." also featuring two women,is also about time--Happy New Year!--evolving into a kind of fable or allegory about a colorful, fantastical tree that seems to have lasted many years beyong human years, magical.
"The Forest," the shortest piece, is obviously also about the natural world, with a sense of enduring natural time, more poem than story, with--again--a tree as emblematic center, including a river. The fourth story is the least like the others, "Man Made Lake," where a man exlores his past lives in therapy. again it's about time, natural time vs human time, exploring how small our lives are compared to the millions of years of history on the planet.
Interestuing for me that I also just read Wendell Berry's Collected essays about the land--and natural time versus human time--and humans, an agrarian manifesto featuring trees and farming and a river. They speka to each other for me, definitely.
Sometimes the color is, like the narratives themselves, just a dab here and there, suggestive, as with the least amount of drawing. We are told Koch lives in the desert now, intending to explore in her work the natural world and how humans now interact with it. But the relations of humans are here, too. Call it comics cli-fi. But after writing this review I read Nicole Rudick’s Afterword and reread the book, which yields even more layers of exploration. Koch is reaching forward to what comics can do. Minimalist, but just enough story and artwork to light our way.
PS: I just read some of the other reviews of this work and see a consistent complaint about Koch's lettering, how hard to read it was, and this is true, I also struggled to decipher the words, but it occurs to me that the effect of the art, the prose, the lettering, is sort of ephemeral, like a soft human footprint on the planet, lovely, reflective, but soon to fade away.
The loosely linked stories, or sections, include "Spiral," "A New Year," "The Forest," and "Man Made Lake." "Spiral" is the longest one, focusing on a rocky relationship between two women that seems to parallel two winding, sometimes intereseting rivers. The women look at a rock they call "The Old Man," sculpted over centuries. Nature time versus human time. "A New Year." also featuring two women,is also about time--Happy New Year!--evolving into a kind of fable or allegory about a colorful, fantastical tree that seems to have lasted many years beyong human years, magical.
"The Forest," the shortest piece, is obviously also about the natural world, with a sense of enduring natural time, more poem than story, with--again--a tree as emblematic center, including a river. The fourth story is the least like the others, "Man Made Lake," where a man exlores his past lives in therapy. again it's about time, natural time vs human time, exploring how small our lives are compared to the millions of years of history on the planet.
Interestuing for me that I also just read Wendell Berry's Collected essays about the land--and natural time versus human time--and humans, an agrarian manifesto featuring trees and farming and a river. They speka to each other for me, definitely.
Sometimes the color is, like the narratives themselves, just a dab here and there, suggestive, as with the least amount of drawing. We are told Koch lives in the desert now, intending to explore in her work the natural world and how humans now interact with it. But the relations of humans are here, too. Call it comics cli-fi. But after writing this review I read Nicole Rudick’s Afterword and reread the book, which yields even more layers of exploration. Koch is reaching forward to what comics can do. Minimalist, but just enough story and artwork to light our way.
PS: I just read some of the other reviews of this work and see a consistent complaint about Koch's lettering, how hard to read it was, and this is true, I also struggled to decipher the words, but it occurs to me that the effect of the art, the prose, the lettering, is sort of ephemeral, like a soft human footprint on the planet, lovely, reflective, but soon to fade away.
March 22, 2025
1.5 stars
As much as I'd like to get behind the minimalist, abstract, poetic vibes in here... It's not for me. I do enjoy how the visual storytelling leaves much of the interpretation to the reader, and how the author got creative with the exploration of different art styles. That being said... The text being so hard to read really frustrated me, and the afterword felt pretentious. I've spent a lot of my life contemplating the connection of natural processes with human emotions and struggles, so none of this felt groundbreaking. It just felt like a new way of expressing that phenomenon in a way that is not compatible with what I like personally.
As much as I'd like to get behind the minimalist, abstract, poetic vibes in here... It's not for me. I do enjoy how the visual storytelling leaves much of the interpretation to the reader, and how the author got creative with the exploration of different art styles. That being said... The text being so hard to read really frustrated me, and the afterword felt pretentious. I've spent a lot of my life contemplating the connection of natural processes with human emotions and struggles, so none of this felt groundbreaking. It just felt like a new way of expressing that phenomenon in a way that is not compatible with what I like personally.
August 1, 2025
2.5 stars
i get the goal and the vibes, i just don't know if i liked it very much. the art itself was GORGEOUS but i felt like i would be more interested in looking at the pages sans dialogue and blown up huge on a gallery wall because the composition is really creative and interesting. in some ways, it reminds me of when you go to an art museum and come up with a story to go along with the painting you're viewing, but didn't really emotionally resonant with me the way i thought it maybe should. also the handwritten text was difficult to read sometimes, and certain panels felt more like drafts that got published than finished work.
i get the goal and the vibes, i just don't know if i liked it very much. the art itself was GORGEOUS but i felt like i would be more interested in looking at the pages sans dialogue and blown up huge on a gallery wall because the composition is really creative and interesting. in some ways, it reminds me of when you go to an art museum and come up with a story to go along with the painting you're viewing, but didn't really emotionally resonant with me the way i thought it maybe should. also the handwritten text was difficult to read sometimes, and certain panels felt more like drafts that got published than finished work.
March 4, 2025
4.5
These comics are beautiful artworks. The way Koch uses blank space liberally, embraces the breadth of the page, allows for the flow of watercolours, and uses words sparingly is just stunning.
Full of the natural world and the way we as humans merge in and out of it, these four stories are something I will want to experience over and over again. The way Koch encourages true looking with her marks on the page is incredible.
These comics are beautiful artworks. The way Koch uses blank space liberally, embraces the breadth of the page, allows for the flow of watercolours, and uses words sparingly is just stunning.
Full of the natural world and the way we as humans merge in and out of it, these four stories are something I will want to experience over and over again. The way Koch encourages true looking with her marks on the page is incredible.
January 12, 2024
These stories are meditative objects in both the objective and objective sense — they are meditations that invite you to meditate on them. Comics for those who sometimes read to the music of John Luther Adams. Marvels of the deep time we are losing to the urgent arrival of our anxious tomorrows.
May 12, 2024
Beautifully illustrated pieces reflecting on nature, its changes, and people's relationship with nature. The sparse, handwritten text forces readers to digest the stories more slowly.
June 6, 2024
This book is not visually accessible and is hard to read the print. Beautiful graphics though.
July 31, 2024
Hard to read (literally). I enjoyed some of the illustrations. 2.5
September 4, 2024
I love the spontaneity in Aidan Koch's storytelling and visuals.
September 16, 2024
Beautiful beautiful book! Minimalist water color paintings paired with poetry and little stories. I’d read the afterword first. My favorite was “New Year.”
September 22, 2024
Drawn to the illustrations, difficult to access.
December 16, 2024
Hypnotizing artwork and storytelling. I do wish the text was a little more legible.
February 25, 2025
I think I am not mature or smart enough to appreciate this!
May 28, 2025
The drawings and paintings in this satisfied me a lot. Sometimes I had to stare at a sentence for 30 seconds before I could read the handwriting, but hey, that’s just part of the vibes
June 25, 2025
Been the mood for blotchy watercolors and poetry comics lately, I guess (see also: Chrysanthemum Under the Waves)
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January 9, 2026If not for the afterword I would have no clue what I just read. Sometimes I’m okay with that but in this instance I was not. It was pretty though!
June 23, 2025
beautiful and difficult to understand. Felt compelled to cut out each panel and hang them all over my walls.
August 3, 2024
Unfortunately the text handwriting style is extremely difficult to read. I was unable to understand much of the text. Please consider using much clearer writing for future books, for accessibility concerns (dyslexia etc). Some of the illustrations were lovely. The best thing is the afterword, which mentions Octavia butler.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews