It was when I was flying last year to LA that I began noticing how the various subdivisions of land can end up looking like abstract comics. I ended up doing that "The World is An Abstract Comic" series on my blog last summer. But I never found on Google Earth the exact sites that I saw, on my descent to LA, that made me realize this. So I decided to reconstruct a strip with views from the suburbs of LA anyway.
Really cool strip, Andrei! Really minor crit, though: The last image seems to slightly break out of the general visual lanuage of the page, probably because it's a different zoom factor. Kind of the same effect like when comic artists create a close-up the quick & dirty way by just enlarging a portion of the preceeding panel. You just see that the brush stokes are too big and the visual continuum gets disrupted. Maybe I'm being anal but stuff like that always bothers me.
I know what you're saying, Fufu, but actually they were all taken at exactly the same level of magnification. It's actually the next-to-last panel that bothers me a bit, it seems to have a different kind of contrast/etc., but that's probably just how atmospheric conditions were on the day the satellite pictures were taken. (Or a differently designed subdivision?) I would like to go back and fix it, but unfortunately I didn't mark the coordinates or zoom level on Google Earth, so I'm stuck working with the images I picked at the time.
But trust me--I did not vary the zoom level at all.
The first and most comprehensive source of abstract comics on the web, tracing the history and surveying the contemporary landscape of abstract sequential art.
On Abstract Comics: The Anthology (Currently SOLD OUT):
The artists assembled by Andrei Molotiu for his anthology ABSTRACT COMICS (Fantagraphics, $39.99) push “cartooning” to its limits... It’s a fascinating book to stare at, and as with other kinds of abstract art, half the fun is observing your own reactions: anyone who’s used to reading more conventional sorts of comics is likely to reflexively impose narrative on these abstractions, to figure out just what each panel has to do with the next.
--Douglas Wolk, New York Times Book Review, Holiday Books edition, December 6, 2009 The collection has a wealth of rewarding material... it is a significant historical document that may jump-start an actual new genre.
--Doug Harvey, LA Weekly It becomes a treat to take a page of art - or a simple panel - and consider how the shapes, texture, depth, and color interact with one another; to reflect on how, when one takes the time, the enjoyment one ordinarily finds in reading a purely textually-oriented, narrative-driven written story can - with the graphic form - be translated into something completely different.
--Adam Waterreus, Politics and Prose, "Favorite Graphic Literature of the Year."
...this arresting book is like a scoop of primordial narrative, representational mud. Which is to say, it has vitaminic powers.
--Design Observer
For years, comics (at least American ones) have doggedly refused for one reason or another, to consider other schools of art and beyond mere representation. It's only now we see artists attempting to branch out and try to push at the edge's of the medium's definition. As such I found Abstract Comics to be a revealing, thought-provoking and genuinely lovely book that I'll be sure to be rereading in the months to come.
This one's really great, Andrei!
ReplyDeleteI see pictographs of beings & other glyphs, which look as if they were drawn with zippers. rock painting style, or Chinese oracle bone script.
ReplyDeletethey also remind me of the chalk giants & horses & so on, carved out of turf: the Uffington white horse, Cerne Abbas giant & friends.
Thanks!
ReplyDeleteIt was when I was flying last year to LA that I began noticing how the various subdivisions of land can end up looking like abstract comics. I ended up doing that "The World is An Abstract Comic" series on my blog last summer. But I never found on Google Earth the exact sites that I saw, on my descent to LA, that made me realize this. So I decided to reconstruct a strip with views from the suburbs of LA anyway.
I love it! It is also kind of scary!
ReplyDeleteL A X
ReplyDeleteReally cool strip, Andrei!
ReplyDeleteReally minor crit, though: The last image seems to slightly break out of the general visual lanuage of the page, probably because it's a different zoom factor.
Kind of the same effect like when comic artists create a close-up the quick & dirty way by just enlarging a portion of the preceeding panel. You just see that the brush stokes are too big and the visual continuum gets disrupted. Maybe I'm being anal but stuff like that always bothers me.
I know what you're saying, Fufu, but actually they were all taken at exactly the same level of magnification. It's actually the next-to-last panel that bothers me a bit, it seems to have a different kind of contrast/etc., but that's probably just how atmospheric conditions were on the day the satellite pictures were taken. (Or a differently designed subdivision?) I would like to go back and fix it, but unfortunately I didn't mark the coordinates or zoom level on Google Earth, so I'm stuck working with the images I picked at the time.
ReplyDeleteBut trust me--I did not vary the zoom level at all.