Word Composition Two

I dare you to try a read it. More word comics here
Drawingsilence.com

The Intercorstal: "Epic" Page 4

Here's some more work from the new Intercorstal collection I'm working on. Where the Batman that I posted before was a side-step into something different, exploring where I could take my abstract comics work, "Epic" ("Epic" being very much a working title) is a step forward, refining the methods I've used in the past.

Reconstitutions by Lucas Taïeb

With the last numeros of his fanzine Reconstitutions, the french comics author Lucas Taïeb goes to abstract comics.

In Reconstitutions, L. Taïeb iterates the same event, panel by panel ; but atoms, which form this one, seem unstable from a panel to a other : the event recompose itself. Like if atoms was subjected in invisible strengths, a sort of  clinamen.


You can see more Reconstitutions or can buy numeros on the Lucas Taïeb' s blog : http://petitstotems.canalblog.com/

ps : the last "planche" posted here looks like krazy kat by Henry Moore…

Lucas Taïeb, Reconstitutions n°3, planche 2

Lucas Taïeb, Reconstitutions n° 3, planche 5

Lucas Taïeb, Reconstitutions n°4, planche 2

Lucas Taïeb, Reconstitutions n°4, planche 5

edit : oups, it's reconstitutions and not reconstruction… (Merci à Lucas Taïeb de me l'avoir signalé).

The Intercorstal on display, ft 3D Batman

I was recently asked to contribute some work to the Heads Up group show being held in Chelmsford, Essex. I was given free reign over what I could preset, and decided to present some of my abstract comic work, but outside of the confines of a bound comic.

The idea of a cardboard Batman costume had been floating around for a while, and by chance I was landed with the space, materials and purpose I'd need to make it. You can see from the photos, by comparing it to the door in shot, how big it is.

The insides are lined with print-outs of pages from The Intercorstal (my abstract comic) which have been cut up either into individual panels, or selections of panels. These were then pasted on according to where they'd fit, rather than through any more elaborate, conscious system. (by coincidence, I'd just finished this when Andrei posted on Facebook that Bulletproof Coffin had just used cutup techniques in one of their issues). The comics sections on the 'fists' were drawn on by hand.

Apparently the worst person to interpret a piece of art is the artist, but I'm going to stab at it anyway. I'd intended it to serve more than one purpose. One was to take the comic 'off the page' somehow. Another was to force myself and/or the audience to question and compare 'traditional' comic (i.e. Batman) with the work I've been doing. It was also intended to be viewed as a 'ceremonial' item, that could be used in some kind of ritual attached to the 'world' of The Intercorstal.

I've written a seperate post about the show itself on my blog and have also created a facebook album of photos from the rest of the show, if you're interested.

If any of you happen to be in the area, Heads Up is on in the old Barclays Building, end of Chelmsford high street, closing on May 27th

"sond" / two frames of maybe 16

The time I was in a show with Maurice Sendak

If you look to the bottom right of the picture, you will the the original art for all eight pages of my piece, "Expedition to the Interior."  If you look right around the corner from it and a foot or so up, there are several illustrations of Wild Things by Mr. Sendak.  This was in the NeoIntegrity Show at MoCCA in 2010. Richard Hahn and Mark Badger also had abstract comics in it (not to mention Peter Halley).  I wish I knew whether Mr. Sendak saw our works, and what he thought of them.

Higglety pigglety pop.

1981 abstract/experimental comics by Manfred Sommer

Friend-of-the-blog Alvaro Pons (Check out his website:  http://www.lacarceldepapel.com/) writes:  "I've found these pages from an old spanish comics magazine of 1981, Comix Internacional (#10, 1981, Toutain Editor). It's a narrative experiment signed by Manfred Sommer, a classical spanish author, famous for his series Frank Cappa. Sommer left the comics at the end of the 80's, with a succesful career as a painter until he died in 2007.  http://manfredsommer.com/" Thanks, Alvaro!

Susan Sontag on the novel in 1965, and comics today

This rant might belong here as much as anywhere else.

In a recent discussion (on the comics scholars list) of an article on Dan Clowes, someone objected to the writer's claim that "in fact, [Clowes'] art has gotten so serious that his work is now in a museum."  Now, I'll be the first to say that that is, indeed, a totally fatuous sentence.  But in reply to my interlocutor's questioning of how contemporary gallery art can be considered "serious," I first gave the rather wise-ass reply, "They mean 'by comparison with comics.'  Then it all makes sense."  After a few more ripostes, I felt I had to explain myself:  "I am, admittedly, feeling rather cynical about our chosen medium of interest these days, but maybe that's a discussion for another time.  Read Susan Sontag on the situation of the novel in 'Against Interpretation' (the book, not the essay).  That's about where we are now with comics, and I thought we'd be well further than that."

 Since I guessed I might be called to account on this, I went looking for the book and the passages I was thinking about.  Here is Sontag writing about the situation of the avant-garde in the various arts circa 1965:

Compared with music and painting, the novel, like the cinema, lags well to the rear of the battlefield. A body of 'difficult' novels comparable to Abstract Expressionist painting and musique concrete has not overrun the territory of critically respectable fiction.  On the contrary, most of the novel's few brave ventures to the front line of modernism get marooned there.  After a few years they seem merely idiosyncratic, for no troops follow the brave CO and back him up.  Novels which, in the order of difficulty and of merit, are comparable to the music of Gian-Carlo Menotti and the painting of Bernard Buffet, are garnished with the highest critical acclaim.  The ease of access and lack of rigor that causes embarrassment in music and painting are no embarrassment in the novel, which remains intransigently arriere-garde....

    Every art form works with some implicit standard of what is elevated and what is vulgar--except the novel.  It could accommodate any level of language, any plot, any ideas, any information.  And this, of course, was its eventual undoing as a serious art form.  Sooner or later discriminating readers could no longer be expected to become interested in one more leisurely 'story,' in half a dozen more private lives laid open for  their inspection.... While music and the plastic arts and poetry painfully dug themselves out of the inadequate dogmas of 19th century 'realism,' by a passionate commitment to the idea of progress in art and a hectic quest for new idioms and new materials, the novel has proved unable to assimilate whatever of genuine quality and spiritual ambition has been performed in its name in the 20th century...

    [I]t is hard not to conclude that what the novel has lacked, and what it must have if it is to continue as a generally (as opposed to sporadically) serious art form, is any sustained distance from its 19th century premises....

    This coming-of-age of the novel will entail a commitment to all sorts of questionable notions, like the idea of a 'progress' in the arts and the definitely aggressive ideology expressed in the metaphor of the avant-garde...  But the price must be paid...

    For until we have a continuous serious 'modern' tradition of the novel, venturesome novelists will work in a vacuum... We shall continue to have monstrous hulks, like abandoned tanks, lying about in the landscape.  An example, perhaps the greatest example, is Finnegans Wake--still largely unread and unreadable, left to the care of academic exegetes who may decipher the book for us, but cannot tell us why it should be read or what we can learn from it. (pp. 101-104)

I guess I began thinking of this from seeing, in recent days, a few examples of recent work in comics praised to high-heaven, work that seemed so mediocre to me--that could only dream of being on the level of Buffet or Menotti--as to feel the various encomiasts and I were coming from different planets.  Sontag's mention of Finnegans Wake makes me think of Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage, equally abandoned, lying about in the landscape of today's comics (and, if you've read it, you'll see that the book already contains that metaphor, perhaps as its guiding metaphor).  I guess I dream of a landscape where something like The Cage finally fully makes sense.  But we are even further away from a cultural climate where the myths of progress in the arts, etc, (which Sontag clearly knew were myths) have any power, so I don't see how such a landscape could ever come about.  (In the afterword to the late '90s--I can't find an exact date--edition of the book, Sontag speaks of  a time when "the modern was still a vibrant idea... before the capitulations embodied in the idea of the 'post-modern.'"  Maybe, from the other side of that capitulation, we can't find our way back to that vibrancy--but that's a tragedy.)  

In the meantime, I'm tired of having to make do with half-measures.  I'm tired of well-told stories, of being "expected to become interested in one more leisurely 'story,' in half a dozen more private lives laid open for  [my] inspection."  If that's what you like, fine, there's a lot more work that can be done in that direction.  But I would like to see the medium of comics be much more than what it is.  As I often say, it's the only art form I know whose potential is immensely greater than what any single work made in it has yet accomplished.

More pages from a grid sketchbook

500 Bones & A Bald-headed BJ, or: "Diagram This, True Believers!"

An event

Original art here

Selections from Abstract Narratives by Mayhem