_a kick in the eye_ exhibition in Oulu, Finland

Reijo Valta has organised an exhibition of some of the pages of the abstract graphic novel A Kick in the Eye at Sarjakuvagalleria, located in the city of Oulu, in the North of Finland.

A couple more photos are here.

My first abstract graphic novel

I'm please to share with you my first abstract graphic novel. It has 125 pages of images. The first 15 can be previewed on Blurb. More can be seen on abstractsequentialart.com.

http://au.blurb.com/b/5761710-the-drift-of-impure-thoughts?fb_action_ids=10153411362512565&fb_action_types=og.shares&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B672167412898587%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.shares%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

'After Wainwright'

Last month I had work featured in the Lakes International Comic Art Festival's window trail, where businesses donated their shop windows as display areas for comics-based artwork. I was lucky enough to be paired with Jonathan at Petrie Design, who suggested working on some of A. Wainwright's work in the style I've developed for The Intercorstal.

It worked really well, and I've had a lot of positive feedback, both from comics-people, Wainwright-people, and people-people. We even won the prize for 'Best Professional Artist' which I'm still a little overwhelmed by.

The pages are still on display for Kendal's Mountain Festival, if anyone does happen to be up that way.

november finds

November's 30 days of comics has given new energy to my collection of found abstract comics:  

/i|x

Found Abstract Comic Nov 4

vacancy

Found Abstract Comic 

Nov 6

>\I

Found Abstract Comic 

Nov 7

|\ |.:¡

Found Abstract Comic

Bonus Nov 7

old shadows on bright days

Found Abstract Comic

Nov 8

resonances

Nov 9

Intercorstal 2 Page 24

New work at 4-panel

Carousel Magazine's 4panel site is doing this week what editor Mark Laliberte has dubbed "Molotiu week."  They ran the second of five strips today.   You can see all the strips I have done for Carousel/4panel since 2012 here.

DEGRADATION ALLEY

review of « a kick in the eye »

Pedro Moura has written a detailed review of the collaborative abstract graphic novel a kick in the eye, which was published in Coldfront. It's very complex, and looks at how signs deliver their meaning, the difference between images and text, and so on. It's an expansion of what he wrote in Portuguese at his blog lerbd.

Intercorstal for Offlife

I've been a fan of Off Life comic for a while now -- they release collections of short comics from mostly-UK based creators. The style of the comics the run with is absolutely nothing like what I make, but I thought I'd give it a punt anyway, and repurposed the layout from a Ditko Amazing Spider-man (which Andrei reliably informs me is Ditko's best page, which I genuinely didn't know beforehand).

To make it a slightly better fit, I put some diary-comic style words together -- details of that can be found on my personal blog about the whole thing: http://garethahopkins.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/submission-to-offlife-10.html

But here it is, in its raw form (other than bumping the layers and cropping, obviously).

Ghostprint

Sunday color comic

Disc Jockey

I have put together another work for the Santoro 2014 competition. Check out here: http://urban-aesthete.tumblr.com/post/94951463509/a-year-flies-by-this-is-my-entry-for-the, and some screens below.

The piece is called Disc Jockey, and it pulls together music visualizations and lyrics of those songs together into a larger narrative arc. It is all the music without the music.

"The Artistry of Alex Toth," poster presentation, Comic Art Conference at SDCC, July 26, 2014

A week ago I gave a poster presentation on Alex Toth at the San Diego Comic Con.  Here are the components of the poster.  (They were laid out in two tiers of four.) Since I do mention abstract comics, compare to them Toth's page compositions, and discuss his abstract doodles, I thought this might be interesting to readers of this blog.  Please keep in mind that the text is supposed to be just bullet points, brief summaries of my theses, and that I greatly expanded on them when discussing this subject with the attendees.  I will expand this into a proper essay (or more) at some point. 

New Comix

Last week I gave two Abstract Comics presentations at 34th World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art

My Yr 9 student's work inspired by Molotiu.

A sequence (with rising asemics)

collage in a sketchbook...by Rosaire Appel

"Identity" by Seth Mirza

snow crystals by Olaus Magnus, 1555

Here's a page from Olaus Magnus' book Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus / History of the Northern Peoples, published in Rome in 1555, while Olaus was in exile from his native Sweden. He also did many of the illustrations in addition to writing the book. Many of the other illustrations, such as those here, are also good fun. If you replaced the fanciful shapes with more "realistic" forms of snowflakes, you'd end up with something even closer to what we consider to be abstract comics.

An architectural strip