This makes me think about the connection between color and sequence. The color is beautiful, but I downloaded the piece, and just to see, extracted the black linework in Photoshop into another document. Looking at that, it seemed to me that the sequentiality, movement from panel to panel, becomes much clearer. The color somehow seems to stop the movement, and almost make it easier to read the piece as a unified abstract painting (I guess because it's so decorative; in your anthology piece, on the other hand, the color definitely adds to the sequence).
Anyway, I love them both, but they do end up doing different things!
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 it is a significant historical document that may jump-start an actual new genre.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.
I really really like the version in Mandarin! :)
ReplyDeleteThis makes me think about the connection between color and sequence. The color is beautiful, but I downloaded the piece, and just to see, extracted the black linework in Photoshop into another document. Looking at that, it seemed to me that the sequentiality, movement from panel to panel, becomes much clearer. The color somehow seems to stop the movement, and almost make it easier to read the piece as a unified abstract painting (I guess because it's so decorative; in your anthology piece, on the other hand, the color definitely adds to the sequence).
Anyway, I love them both, but they do end up doing different things!
it would make a nice embroidered bedspread.
ReplyDeleteif I owned the piece of cloth, I'd rather hang it on a wall than have it on my bed, though.