Two Trains, by Rosaire Appel

40 pages, black and white paperback

This isn't an abstract comic, or is it? The subject is the tension which occurs when words and images co-exist on the same page.
for more information: http://www.rosaireappel.com/two-trains.html

"Drawing" thread from TCJ message board, January 2003

I promised that when I got a chance I would post more of the threads I saved from the old Comics Journal Message Board. Here is the earliest one I saved. (For some reason, I didn't like keeping the hyperlinks, so I systematically deleted the dates and times of the posts. However, one survived, helping me date this to January, 2003.) The topic is "drawing," in general, and what one might qualify as the (potential) excess, in comics, of the drawing in relation to the story it is supposed to illustrate. For that reason, even though it does not address abstract comics directly, I think it could be of great interest to the readers of this blog.

Long-format comic (in progress) by Goedele Van Kerkhoven

Goedele is a professional musician living in Brussels. She also started the "Abstract Comics" entry on Wikipedia.

Matt Madden reviews my piece, "[Otherwise Untitled]," from "Nautilus."

Click the pic:

Brandl: Homage Silence

Inspired by Draw's Drawing Silence down below (the one with ballpoint pen), I made an homage to him. I stole part of his grid and used on my own image, a stone litho from a few years ago. Thanks Draw!

Fingers on a lightbox

A photo of Abstract 24 on a lightbox. See the original comic here. Another of my permanent marker comics.
Drawingsilence.com

A PSYCHOWESTERN, by Gustave Morin

there's a preview of Morin's hacked up cowboy comics at issuu.com/mediacity/docs/psychowestern.

it begins with severely abstract pages and gradually resolves into recognisable bits & pieces of some sort of cowboy comics.

the physical book, which is longer, is available from Media City.

'Loose Pages'

( from an on-going series of digital prints called 'Loose Pages' by Rosaire Appel )

Sails

Abstract 26 from Series 2. From last year, used a large permanent marker this time.
Drawingsilence.com

Eyeballs on Facebook

I've set up a new Facebook page for my upcoming printed book of Eyeballs dailies. (So far, I've just added a few samples to start it off but there will be much more to come...)

Eyeballs is a comic strip I made every day for one year. I've been showing many of them in various places online and in art shows, in addition to selling them individually at conventions but this will be the first time they're all collected together as one book (366 pages!)

Although these comics might only be considered abstract by the most open definition of the word, I think there are some similarities with how they can be read: projecting a personal narrative into the sequence; simply enjoying the shapes and movements; etc...

Anyway, I hope you 'like' them:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eyeballs/191419207558291

Hey, cool, the reviews keep coming

Here's another recent one I just found, at Full-Stop.net, a "new site committed to an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture."

They also have a long review of three books by visual poet and friend-of-this-blog Derek Beaulieu:

AC anthology review from Brazil

Here.

The Google translation is not very good but, for what it's worth, here it is.

We've actually gotten a lot of good feedback from South and Central America. I'm looking forward to seeing new abstract comics coming from there.

Abstract Comics and the TCJ Message Board

The Comics Journal message board, the principal forum for alternative comics discussion and fandom in the late '90s and for much of the 00's, is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. (Well, maybe not that, since Tom Spurgeon was its maker; and encountering its ghost is probably the stuff of Tom's nightmares...) (I'm joshing you, Tom, don't get your gan... uh, dander up!)

This is, actually, news of some relevance to those interested in abstract comics. The TCJ board was, effectively, the birthplace of the Abstract Comics anthology, or at least the birthplace of the idea for it. Please allow me to give a brief history of its conception, as seen from my point of view.

Bust

Abstract 35 from Series 2. I used ballpoint pen.
Drawingsilence.com

Kirby!!!!

Found this on eBay. Look at the play of shapes and the directionality of the hatching from panel to panel. A perfect example of what I've been calling "sequential dynamism"--and a demonstration of how close action comics can come to abstraction.

Descent 1

Descent 1 inspired these doodles. See also Descent 1a and Four Colours 5

Drawingsilence.com