Chapter 4

Avalanche

It's the winter :

best possible new year to all

David Greenberger Tuesday! (Sixties edition)

"By 2009 No One From The Jimi Hendrix Experience Was Still Alive"


"They Kicked Out Pete And Then Ringo Joined"


"The Dying Off Of The Mamas & Papas"

Convoluted Words by James Mahan

Thunderstorm In Neo Tokyo

 I remixed portions of old Thor comics with Akira and came up with this little two pager.  I'll probably put it in my next mini which will hopefully be out in the Spring.  (Don't worry, Draw, I'm still workin' away on a new version of the Chase.)

AC Film Festival: "The Dot and the Line," Chuck Jones, 1965

Think of it as a refreshing sorbet in between heavier courses...



Based on Norton Juster's 1963 book of the same title. More info here.

Jochen Gerner, Abstraction (1941-1968)

(Sorry, it's in french language ; the translation in english language is under)

Abstraction : Action d'abstraire, opération intellectuelle par laquelle, dans un objet, on isole un caractère pour ne considérer que ce caractère ; résultat de cette action. Sans l'abstraction, l'esprit humain ne pourrait conduire aucun raisonnement un peu compliqué. L'abstraction ne crée pas des êtres et n'est qu'un artifice logique. Le pouvoir d'abstraction. Par une abstraction puissante, il a saisi ce qu'il y avait de plus général dans son sujet. La blancheur considérée en soi est une abstraction, puisqu'il y a dans la nature, non la blancheur, mais des choses blanches. Il faut bien se garder de prendre des abstractions pour des réalités. (Le Littré)

 Après TNT en Amérique et Panorama du Feu, Jochen Gerner, avec Abstraction (1941-1968), poursuit son œuvre de recouvrement de bandes-dessinées (que l'on pourrait qualifier de) populaires ;  par ce travail d'abstraction, il entend mieux révéler ces dernières ; Less is more.*

Jochen Gerner, Abstraction (1941-1968), 2011

Star Wars #38: Lasers, Explosions and the Bio-Mechanical Organism!

Plotted, Pencilled and Colored by Michael Golden. Inked by Terry Austin. Published by Marvel Comics, August 1980.

David Greenberger Tuesday! (Secret origins edition)

These are all from 2010.

"I Cut Wood, I Saw Dust"

"You Drive Really Boring"

"You Continue to Drive Really Boring"

L'oiseau est tombé au sol

You can see a premier jet here.

"A Bout de souffle" by Warren Craghead

It's not abstract, but this impressionistic shot-by-shot re-drawing of Godard's "Breathless" by our very own Warren Craghead, over at Hooded Utilitarian, has to be seen to be believed.

Now if I can only convince Warren to post some more work here! (Hint hint...)

A little abstract comic I did after I seen this Nina Roos' comic yesterday :

Sans titre, Mattias-Fausse-Monnaie, dec. 2011

AC Film Festival: John Whitney Sr.

"Catalog," 1961


"Permutations," 1966


"Matrix," 1971


"Matrix III," 1972

Mythes de Cthulhu, by Breccia

In the same way of The Fourth Dimension Is A Many Splattered Thing ! (réalisme pompier vs abstract forms), there are Alberto Breccia's comics adapted from Cthulhu's Myth's Lovecraft. Indeed, to paint the fall in madness and horror, Breccia used techniques as collages, expressionist and abstract forms ; and he confronted it with academic drawings.

Breccia, Le monstre sur le seuil. (crédits : http://www.alberto-breccia.net/les-mythes-de-cthulhu/)

Breccia, planche original ((crédits : http://www.alberto-breccia.net/les-mythes-de-cthulhu/)

Few Breccia's planches originales here

Frames, by Florian Huet

this is just one of Florian's innovative creations. taken from ===.

he's part of the polystyrène gang: revue.polystyrene.free.fr & editions.polystyrene.free.fr.

Jack Kirby went to abstract comics !

(I didn't found this comic book on this blog, so…)

In 1957, Jack Kirby drawn a comic, The Fourth Dimension Is A Many Splattered Thing ! which is quite similar to tv show Twillight Zone, whose two pages are proto-abstract comics (others are more conventionnal) :

(whole story is here).

Constructions et événements aléatoires en six strips.

A thing posted yet in my own blog (but I think it will have a best visibility here ; and I like this…).
It's one of my bandes-dessinées aléatoires ; so, think to refresh this webpage (or come back on) for fully appreciate it.



constructions et événements aléatoires en 6 strips, novembre 2011


More "bandes-dessinées aléatoires" here, here ore here.

Mattias Fausse-Monnaie's DIY comics exercise

Mattias posted this exercise over at his blog.

Allow me to quickly translate/summarize: download the grid pdf on his blog (of much higher quality than the jpeg above). Print it out or open it in Photoshop or some other image-manipulating software. Draw the panel frames based on the straight lines in the grid (Mattias suggests using a lightbox if working over a print-out, but I think it might also be cool to draw directly on the print-out [EDIT: Mattias pointed out he does mention drawing directly on the print-out; I was just reading too quickly and like an idiot missed it. Sorry!]). Draw the images in the individual panels based on the elliptical lines in the grid. Et voila! (See Mattias' blog for illustrations of all the stages.)

If several people do this and send me the results, we could post them here all together.

I do think Mattias deserves to become a member of the blog for this, don't you? The invitation is on its way!

In case you've ever wondered what it would be like to take a final exam in a history-of-comics class...

Romancez by James Mahan

David Greenberger Tuesday!

"The Path to Three Dozen"

"The Tide Comes In, The Tide Goes Out"

"Suddenly"

a section from "enigma"

on view at the International Print Center New York through Jan 7, 2012.

pages from Alvaro de Sá's 12 x 9

2 pages from Alvaro's 12 X 9, published in 1967.

he was a co-founder of the Brazilian process/poem movement (= poema/processo, in Portuguese), whose members wrote many visual poems about visual communication.

these pages purloined from one of Amir Brito Câdor's web places: seminariolivrodeartista.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/alvaro-de-sa-poemics

it appears that he's posted every page of 12 x 9. a wonderful book, deserving a new edition.

Query--abstract comics in shows

I received the following query from Kym Tabulo, who is doing a Doctorate of Creative Arts at Sunshine Coast University in Queensland, Australia, on the topic Concerning the Spiritual in Abstract Sequential Art:

Currently I am researching Gallery Comics.

I know of Silent Pictures and Out of Sequence.

Can you please tell me if anyone has undertaken a solo abstract gallery comics exhibition?

Perhaps Nina Roos, Rosaire Appel, Mark Staff Brandl or Andrei Molotiu?

Kym is referring to the shows Silent Pictures, organized by Linda Norden and myself at the James Gallery at CUNY in September 2009, and the traveling show, Out of Sequence, organized by John Jennings and Damian Duffy for the Krannert Art Museum, and which went to two other locations. Mark Staff Brandl and I were featured in that one.

To begin to answer Kym, there also was an abstract comics contingent in the NeoIntegrity show at MoCCA in 2010--Mark Badger, Richard Hahn, and I, in this case, plus a 1992 piece by Peter Halley. Also, there was an "abstract comics" section--featuring Warren Craghead, Blaise Larmee, Rosaire Appel, Derik Badman, and me--in the Party Crashers show at the Arlington Arts Center, in 2010-2011 (Here is my work in that show).



As for me, I've had solo shows featuring abstract comics at the University of Louisville in 2005(Here is the essay written about my work on that occasion by Jay Kloner), at ArtLexis in Brooklyn in 2009 (unfortunately the gallery seems to be out of business now, and I can't link to it directly--but see image above), and at Franklin College in 2010. (Plus I've had abstract comics in a bunch of group shows.)

Anyone else? Please post all the shows in which you've had abstract comics in the comments. Thanks!

AC Film Festival: James Whitney

"Variations on a Circle," 1941-42


"Yantra," 1957


"Lapis," 1966

For more by James Whitney and his brother John Whitney Sr., see this earlier post.

Box algebra: logic as abstract comics / abstract comics as logic

From here. This "box algebra" or "box arithmetic" is adapted from G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (1969), one of the strangest books ever written, about which I'm going to have to post some day in much more detail.

EDIT: afterthought. Maybe I should briefly explain why I'm posting this here, beyond the possibly fortuitous resemblance of its diagrams to abstract comics. Or maybe, I should explain that I don't think that resemblance is all that fortuitous. Yes, "Laws of Form" essentially rewrites, with supposedly only one sign (actually two, the marked and the unmarked space) the laws of Boolean logic. But, before getting to that level, you can see it as simply a formal exercise, whereby arbitrary rules are established for the manipulation of a simple form (and its absence), together with spatial notions of juxtaposition and containment. The simple rules allow for the transformation of one spatial structure into another. Then these transformations can be enchained, to either complicate or reduce those structures. We are talking about a set of formal constraints, basically, that help create a sequence of structures made up of rectangles and lacks. It's pretty clear how each structure in a"logical" sequence can be seen to correspond to a panel, and there even is a kind of "narrative" logic to how you get from the first structure in a chain to the last; this narrative logic is purely formal, but it has a clear directionality, leading to the final intended structure (the "theorem" it is trying to "prove").

This logic of transformation can be appreciated rationally, as a model for logical development; but it can also be appreciated aesthetically. (And, perhaps, deep down, mathematics is always appreciated aesthetically; after all, mathematicians probably use the word "beautiful" to describe a proof more often than artists or critics use it to describe a work of art.) And maybe that aesthetic appreciation--in being an appreciation of the rules of transformation of form, and how they are manipulated--is the very same thing as that rational appreciation; there is no difference.

In the same way, it seems to me, abstract comics can--and often do--establish a formal narrative arc by establishing a kind of formal logic, that leads from first panel to last, though one that is most often perceived only intuitively, not based on strict and clear rules. Nevertheless, it's nice to see for once the rules being made explicit.

Well, maybe not just once--here is an exercise I created based on formal constraints:

http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2009/04/abstract-comics-exercise.html

And here is a comic by Ibn al Rabin/Mathieu Baillif, which seems to be based on a very clear development of only a few formal rules (which makes sense, since Mathieu in his day job is a mathematician):

http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2009/04/syntactic-comics.html

6 decemb / abst com

David Greenberger Tuesday!

"The Come-Hither Finger Curl"


"Communication via Finger Wiggling"


"The Illusion of Nudity"



All images ink on paper, image area 7.25" square

AC Film Festival: John and James Whitney, Film Exercises, 1943-44

"Five Film Exercises" 1, 1943


"Five Film Exercises," 2-3, 1944


"Five Film Exercises," 4, 1944

On John. On James. We'll have further posts on their solo works.

(I couldn't find the fifth exercise online. If you find it, please post the link in a comment or send it to me, and I'll add it.)

An appreciation of AC contributor Andy Bleck

Click the pic.