LDComics Online Comics Fair: ‘The Keluarga Cable Ship Company’ By Mereida Fajardo

I’ve already pointed you in the direction of the LDComics online comics fair, running from 1st-31st July, 86 creators, 86 new digital comics, a perfect way to experience the incredible talents making comics right now. But right now I’m going to show you one of those talents, with Mereida Fajardo‘s The Keluarga Cable Ship Company.

There’s only a few days left of this LDComics Online Fair (yes, I should have done this way earlier in the month – but, you know, life), but that doesn’t excuse you from heading their way and checking out the huge number of incredibly talented folks making some incredible comics.

Case in point, Fajardo‘s The Keluarga Cable Ship Company… damn, this is good comics…

I’ve covered a little of what Fajardo does with Zinezilla, but this is something else, a very digital thing, vertically scrolling perfectly to tell its story, Fajardo experimenting so well with the form of what comics can be in the digital space.

Here’s how Fajardo sets things out on the first page of The Keluarga Cable Ship Company.…

‘More than 99 percent of intercontinental telecomunications, including internet traffic, is carried by fibre-optic cables running along the bed of the world’s seas. Indeed, this digital comic is likely coming to you through the oceans. This vast and delicate network, the bedrock of Modern life and its burgeoning technologies, is maintained by a small fleet of repair ships that keeps the world online. Past and present collide when a software engineer arrives on one such ship, where his father works. Old wounds are torn open – can this connection be repaired? This continuous scroll comic unfolds across three separate but interlinked channels of action. the freeflow form invites readers to approach the story in different ways, separately, one by one, top down, or all at once.’

Yes, it’s one long scroll, three columns giving us the storyline, all linked perfectly, Fajardo exploring so well all the possibilities that exist when comics aren’t tied into the physical form, the page turn. This is wonderful experimentation indeed, but made even better by the glorious art she produces for it.

The story is one that’s tied into the small-scale, whilst big events happen all around. It’s focused on a ship installing and maintaining the telecom cables that keep international comms flowing. But inside that, it’s all about a father-son relationship, one I’ve been musing on recently as my own dear dad lies in his care home bed awaiting the end of days. Here, the son’s a software engineer, dropped in for an IT upgrade onboard the ship his dad’s working on in a lesser position than he used to have.

It’s practically impossible to convey the effect of reading this by taking screenshots of the comic, as that limits the view you have, constrains the continuous scroll and confines things to just what is captured in the cropped image. But it does give you a flavour of things, the mood evoked, the tremendous artwork all the way through this one.

As things go on, we get deeper and deeper into the past of these two related yet so different men, coping with their difficult relationship in confined quarters here.

It’s emotive, thoughtful, just so well done. A downbeat thing that’s one to make you consider your own relationships as it details the small moments in this relationship. Yet it’s also full of artistic beauty in how Fajardo constructs the three-column layout, each column important in one way or another, the space used to perfection, both in the tight, confinement of the panels down below the deck onboard or in the open skies above. The end result is pure brilliance, experimentation that works, never forgetting that comics tell a sequential tale, even when it’s an experimental one like this.

Definitely worth taking a look at. The Keluarga Cable Ship Company by Mereida Fajardo is something very special indeed.

Mereida Fajardo’s The Keluarga Cable Ship Company is part of LDComics fair, you can buy a copy here at ldcomicsfair.com. The fair runs from 1st July to 31st July. You should definitely check it out. And I look forward to talking about just how good the fair is for its second year in 2026.