Fumetti Flame by Mike Getsiv

Brandl, a Webcomic, Graphic Flash-Memoir Vignette Nr 5: Metal Grit Drawings

This is the fifth of a series of auto-bio vignette webcomics, a form of flash-lit, as sequential art, podcasts and videos. This time, no separate audio podcast as the webcomic is primarily visual. You can see the original comic on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Spoutible or at the new blog site I made for them https://brandlflashmemoirvignettes.blogspot.com/
This one is titled: Graphic Flash-Memoir Vignette 5, Metal Grit Drawing.
There is also a video of it. Link to Youtube Video: https://youtu.be/NgUq0TpuV8A

This was a 1979 work that I made and only much much later, about 1993, under the inspiration from ANdrei Molotiu, realized it was actually an abstract comic.

 

I Got Interviewed by The Comics Journal

Hi everyone,

Quick note to highlight this interview I did with The Comics Journal, which came out last month. It covers my history of making comics, with some reminiscing about, and gratitude toward, this blog and its contributors.

https://www.tcj.com/its-a-cliche-but-i-write-what-i-know-an-interview-with-gareth-a-hopkins-abstract-cartoonist/

Here's a recent double-page spread from one of my current projects, 'Too Dry To Cope', which I didn't mention in the interview because I've only started it since the interview stopped.

A History of Composition in Art, Abstract "Covers" Paintings (M. S. Brandl)

This is a sub-section of my 500+ "Covers" artworks created from 2001 until 2023. These are paintings or drawings in oil, acrylic, gouache, and ink on paper, canvas or board in various sizes, often not far from letter size, but from half that up to a few feet /meters in size. They recognizably utilize the structure of comic-book covers, or Show-Card lettering posters, with title, bold lettering, price, date, numbering, image and so on. They have been usually exhibited in groups, as installations and as "footnotes" to my large painting-installations.

 The whole group is on Blogger here (http://brandlcovers.blogspot.com/) or Facebook here (https://www.facebook.com/share/1PxS2QfphgenLbih/)

 

This group is one of man sub-sets within the whole group, each made for very specific contexts and shows. This one is 'The History of Composition in Art in Abstract Comic "Covers".' It was made for an exhibition of abstract comics organized by artist, art historian and organizer Andrei Molotiu, who we all pay homage to on this blog!, for a show in 2009-2010 in City University of New York James Gallery titled "Silent Pictures. Special thanks to Andrei and to curator Linda Norden who managed to find a spinner rack to display them in as I prefer. The show was inspired by Molotiu's excellent anthology, 'Abstract Comics' (Fantagraphics Books, 2009). The whole series is meant to be seen as a sequence, and best in a Spinner rack.

 

 

AI Generated Abstract Comic in the style of Jack Kirby

 

GetsiVizioN eBooks on Amazon

All seven of my abstract, semi-abstract, wordless, asemic, etc. books are now available in eBook format on Amazon. 

You can purchase them here https://www.amazon.com/author/mikegetsiv

(On some platforms Kindle books are not available using the Amazon app but you can buy them by using your browser and going to Amazon.com)

Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors

 Hi everyone

I genuinely thought I'd posted here more recently than 2019 but looking back, apparently I haven't. It's been a very busy three years, as I've been working on Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors, and releasing the individual stories from it in a variety of ways, including digital-only to comixology (lost when Amazon gutted that platform) and print-at-home.

A Kickstarter to print the full 244 page collection is going live next week, on the 23rd August (here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grthink/explosive-sweet-freezer-razors). I'd sent it to a couple of publishers but got knocked back because it was a bit too different to be easy to market, so I've picked it up to self-publish.

The content of the book is a series of 10 short stories, all abstract comics, presented with text (some of which is relatively straightforward, some of which is very fractured). The visual style of each story is very different, with common elements in approach and in the text. 

You can read one of the stories, A Hill To Cry Home, here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bUHqDtYRqbk9susYDULvUYC0uTeYOi4_/view

And here are some example pages from the book:

An excerpt from my abstract graphic novel, "Universe A," in the new issue of "Shenandoah"

A 20-page excerpt from Universe A appears in the new issue of the literary journal Shenandoah: https://shenandoahliterary.org/712/universe-a/

I also wrote a pretty long explanatory text about it, and about abstract comics in general, which may interest the more theoretically minded readers. It's linked to from the front page of the excerpt. Here are a couple of highlights: 

Universe A arose out of a desire to overcome what I saw as one of the limitations of all abstract comics up to this point, including my own earlier ones: being relatively short, they tended to chronicle one formal event, a simple set of changes, one basic formal arc, then politely get out of the way. I set myself the goal of a two-hundred-page continuous abstract narrative as a challenge, to see how such formal transformation could be kept going (hopefully in an interesting way) at a much greater length than heretofore practiced. The idea, if you will, is similar to writing a symphony when everything done so far has been in basic song form. Composers were forced to develop new forms that could carry musical development over stretches of twenty or thirty minutes rather than three. A good example of this is the sonata form, as practiced by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which, simply put, complicated things by contrasting themes, breaking them up, and interweaving them, rather than simply repeating them once or twice then stopping. Since music is always on my mind in some form or another, you will find in the excerpt here an interweaving of different sets of visual shapes—blobs and blots and conduits and more—that is not so different from what I just described; and indeed music provided a model for how to structure a lengthy abstract visual narrative, for which I could find no other models elsewhere.  

...

An abstract comic exists as a comic, as an act of visual narration, only in the transition between panels. Therefore, the visual juxtaposition of panels is crucial to its functioning, and that readerly phenomenon, noticed in representational comics, of eclipsing the rest of the page while focusing on a single panel is no longer an option. The abstract comics page forms a differential visual field inhabited and structured by differences and deferrals that can only be perceived within its gestalt. As the comic is unable to fall back upon a represented temporality, the implicit directionality of its visual field is essential to it. Arrayed along that directionality, yet also modulated by other juxtapositions that go beyond simple linear sequencing, the set of panel-to-panel differences constructs the sequential dynamism that scans the page.

Central Park by Mike Getsiv