this is a page from Michael Jacobson's Action Figures.
comics, or not?
there's an e-book edition published by me, in A4 page size: http://avance.randomflux.info/
an e-book edition with an introduction by me, in US page size: http://www.literatemachine.com/product/michael-jacobson/action-figures
or you can buy a glorious lo-fi paperback copy: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/action-figures/5728952
we all know the categories of conventional novels & graphic novels, but what about those things in between, like Michael's Action Figures & The Giant's Fence, Rosaire Appel's books, Cementimental's book, Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté & La femme 100 têtes, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing & others?
& further, there are examples of mainly verbal fiction, which use a heavy dose of graphics. A good example: Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales, by Julio Cortázar, which has a mixture of straight text (en español), comics & other graphics. (thanks, Xavier, for showing me this.)
Zoë Sadokierski, a professional book designer & scholar, is researching typographically enhanced fiction: http://zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/ (there's a list of "Fictional prose with graphic elements" on the right hand side).
the first edition of volume 3 of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy (1761) included a page of marbling, inspired by Turkish ebru marbling. Some commentators say that the author was trying to represent Tristram's state of mind.
Jacobson's 'Action Figures' instigates some conversation between comics, sequence art and hieroglyphs - while being a little outside all those categories. this is increasingly rare in our world: a species undefined.
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