Astral Talk, edited by Aidan Koch. Publication Studio, 2011. 65p. $20 softcover, $10 DRM-free pdf. Featuring: Clara Bessijelle, Austin English, Dunja Jankovic, Blaise Larmee, Jason Overby, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Ward Zwart, and Aidan Koch

My love/hate affair with comics anthologies continues… I was really excited for this anthology when I first heard about and then wasn’t too impressed the first time I read it. But over time it’s grown on me. It’s not a great anthology (but how many great contemporary anthologies are there?) but it is a good one and, perhaps more importantly, a pretty consistent one.

Artist Aidan Koch edited this collection of comics from Publication Studio, a publisher that has not previously done any comics (which might partially account for how I’ve seen no reviews of this). They are a print-on-demand publisher who also offers their books as DRM-free ebooks (pdfs). Many of their books (including this anthology) were available as free downloads, but that appears to no longer be the case. The “free reading commons” links are there but I get stopped at a login. Perhaps the free pdf model was not working out for them.

If you look at the list of contributors above, you’ll probably already have a certain idea of what this anthology will be like. If you are familiar with these artists you won’t be surprised by their work here. It would be tempting to try to group these artists together under some kind of label: many of them are friends/acquaintances (in her brief introduction Koch states as much) and have appeared in anthologies together before, many (most?) of them live or have lived in the Portland, Oregon area. More importantly though, is what they share artistically. Most of these artists (and specifically the comics in this anthology) are working on the margins of comics. A number of the pieces make use of collage as well as abstraction in one form or another (though none are completely abstract comics). Most of these comics are also not traditional narrative work. They are more like flash fiction or poetry than short stories. But that is all generalization on some level.

The anthology starts out with a short story by Ward Zwart, the one artist in the book I’m not at all familiar with. I think he’s a Belgian (?) artist (based on some searches online). His piece is probably the most traditional in the book. In fairly realistic pencil drawing, he tells a brief first person narrated anecdote about a girl and a squirrel. It’s kind of funny in a quirky way, but it really made little impression on me.

This is followed by Jaakko Pallasvuo’s “New Sincerity” which reads like a illustrated letter, a first person narrator (autobiographical, I assume) addressing a reader. I’ve read a couple comics by Pallasvuo, including the short-lived series of comics letters between he and Koch, and I really love his fragmented geometric page layouts and the way he combines the representational with the abstract in a kind of shifting spectrum of juxtaposed images. The last page includes the text “Possible Artist’s Statements” which aptly summarizing the comic as a whole. That last page (above) itself is worth the whole comic.

From Pallasvuo’s drawings the book moves to Dunja Jankovic’s collage story “New Waves.” The discordant imagery mixed with texts about extrasensory practices makes it read like a comic made by the Surrealists. My collage preferences tend towards a more consistent imagery (which goes against conventional collage I guess), so I don’t find the imagery particularly attractive. But I do like seeing this kind of experimentation with media going on. Jankovic has a collage piece in the new Küs! anthology that is, in my opinion, more visually successful. (Both stories also appear be reprinted in her new self-published collection Circles Cycles Circuits.)

Jason Overby’s “Wabi Sabi of the Hell’s Angels” feels more restrained than a lot of Overby’s previous works, a strict 9 panel grid of image/text combinations, but also considerably more abstract than his earlier narrative works. This is the most poetic of the anthology’s comics. There is, to my mind, no single reading to be made. The text is grouped into 2 pages (first and last) containing 9 single words and 2 pages with a sentence spread across the nine panels, a nice formal arrangement that allows the more coherent sentences to play off the fragmented words that precede and follow. The images—comprised of abstract marks or shapes, collage, and even text (where the text works more as an image than the text that sits under the panel)—offer less an illustration of the words than an oblique accompaniment that is both frustratingly difficult to comprehend and pleasantly open to interpretation. Over the course of the 4 pages, Overby also uses 4 variations on the primary black/white colors of the panels and gutters.

This is followed up by the more narratively direct (though still visually abstracted) “Here I am” by Austin English. As I noted in my BCGF round-up, this story is printed with four images per page that reduces them if not to incomprehensibility, then at least to a level that makes the contents harder to parse than in a slightly larger format. If Austin’s story is more straightforwardly narrative than many of the comics in this anthology it is also, in its narrative, rather mysterious. Austin’s story more and more seem to eschew any explanation, they are sequence of events, people interacting, often in their living spaces, that have little of the psychological introspection that one might expect from such a plot. Austin’s visual abstraction varies from that of Overby, who is often non-representational as whole. Instead the images here are transformations of narrative content into something chaotic, expressive, and, in its own way, decorative. Unlike Pallasvuo’s juxtaposition of abstract and representational, Austin’s usage is much more integrated.

For something completely different, Blaise Larmee’s “Atrium” consists of three double-page spreads that take the juxtaposition of comics panels and transform it into a layering of time/motion. The second and third spreads add layers of content onto the first spread, building up the the collage-y elements in the background and adding repetitions of two foreground figures (those girls that Blaise uses so often) in different stages of movement. There’s an element of playful meta-commentary in the far right side of the images showing a screenshot of the Photoshop “layers” panel over a tiny book icon (whose page is seen turning from one image to the next). Like a lot of Blaise’s recent work, it’s a kind of purely visual comic, neither narrative story nor in the poetic register, and in that regards it is quite successful.

Editor Koch’s “Melancholy Heartbreak”, despite it’s rather melodramatic title, is a subtle narrative piece. Each page seems to narratively exist in its location with a different character and setting. Together they build up the image of remembering someone lost to the past, a kind of wistful wondering. Like much of Koch’s work it doesn’t overstate the case too much. The page layouts take on an appearance like slanted roofs on structures (see above). The last page falls into geometric abstraction with a mostly erased block of text. Another successful piece.

The anthology ends with Clara Bessijelle’s “X Ray”, a short narrative drawn in pencil (more caricatural than Zwart’s) each page as a full-size image. I just don’t know what to make of this one, it feels incomplete. It seems to be telling a story: a scientist with an x-ray of a spine goes out to lunch with another scientist. Another man disturbs them… the whole time the first man is holding up the x-ray. I’m not clear what Bessijelle is attempting to do here.

All in all, this is an anthology that offers some directions comics can go beyond what has become the mainstream of alternative/art comics (for instance, relying on pulp genres). If they are not all completely successful works, they are at least the works of artists attempting to stretch themselves and the form. What most holds these works together aesthetically is the way that each work requires the reader to engage on more than a simple reading of text and comprehension of representational imagery, more than just connecting the action in one panel to the action in the next panel. Each works with omission and subtlety in various ways, some more successfully than others. My biggest qualm in recommending this anthology is the $20 price tag on a 65 page black and white softcover. That seems a high even for a print-on-demand book. Maybe you’ll want to try the pdf for $10.

Canadian comics is all Drawn & Quarterly and Dave Sim, right? English language Canadian comics get the attention from the English reading blogosphere, but there’s a whole world of French language comics from Quebec. Thanks to the webcomics at Grandpapier (a few of which I’ve written about before: here, here, here, and briefly here) I discovered the work of the group of Quebecois comic artists around the small publisher Colosse, which publishes small print runs of books by a fairly consistent group of artists. I’ve read and reread a few of these in the past weeks, and I thought I’d share some thoughts on works by three of the artists.

Page 14 from Cinema (web version).

Cinéma by Sébastien Trahan (Colosse, 2010) – I was first tipped off about this book by Vincent Giard (on whom, more below) who suggested this to me after reading my recent comic Badman’s Cave, in which I redrew an old western comic, removing the figures and abstracting some of the objects. In this book, created for Grandpapier’s “24 heures de bande dessinée” in 2009, Trahan has also redrawn an old western 24 heures pour Doc Silver (1968). In a loose black line, Trahan starts with redrawing the full contents of the panels. The story has the Doc looking for disappeared people, one quickly realizes, not people who have been kidnapped or run-off, but those who have literally disappeared. At one point he speaks to a woman who is invisible. Across the course of the comic, more elements of the story-world begin to disappear: characters, words, objects, setting, even panel borders. The penultimate page is a few panel borders and some hatching, the last is blank. Beyond this level of the comic, the captions set-up a framing narrative. An unnamed and unseen (though I guess that is him on the cover) narrator speaks in black caption boxes that pepper the story: the comic we are seeing is a film the narrator is watching. The narrator is confused by the film, watching as the sound goes out (the words balloons are emptied), as the characters disappear. Soon even the narrator disappears. The comic is haunting in its way, not through the emotional pull of the western story but through the slow disintegration of the world. I’ve read and reread this book a number of times, something in it speaks to me. Sure, I love formalist art like this, but there is more to it than that. You can read it yourself (the words are in French, but almost half the book is wordless) at Grandpapier.

Lecture à Vue: La Mauvaise Tête Dessine Alto by various (Colosse, 2010) – This anthology features a group of six artists (La Mauvaise Tète) making adaptions (very loose ones it seems) of works from the publisher Alto. The included artists are David Turgeon, Vincent Giard, Jimmy Beaulieu (who is also the publisher of Colosse), Julie Delporte, Sébastien Trahan, and Catherine Genest. Perhaps it is just the artists’ styles, but I think the loose adaption concept ended up causing them to create stories that are quite open. Almost every story in the book has the pleasing quality of feeling unexplained, not too wrapped up, never completely clear. Because of this, the stories lend themselves to rereading. This is one of the most successful anthologies I’ve read in awhile (probably a combination of the theme and the group coherency). A few comments on my favorite pieces:

Page 61 from Lecture a vue. From Trahan's La reduction.

Trahan’s 24 page story “La réduction” is the longest in the book, a story that I find hard to explain. The images all have the look of being photo referenced (though not photo realistic), showing images of China. There are no apparent characters shown, the images coalesce around setting and occasional scenes (people waiting in a train station, crowded city streets, empty plains traversed by train tracks). The narrative captions which provide the main narrative thrust of the story are elliptical, telling the story of Monsieur Ho (which is the title of the novel Trahan is adapting) a officer of the census for the Chinese government who seems to lose himself in the country, in thoughts. I am guessing, based on the title, that Trahan is taking text from various parts of the novel to create a reduced form of the story (kind of like the Oubapian procedure reducing a comic to one page formed from various panels from different places in the work). Overall the mode is quite evocative. I sure wish Trahan made more comics, because the two I’ve read so far are really fabulous.

David Turgeon’s “La Thrave: un introduction” is basically a man explaining a strange tarot-esque card game to a women. The art is almost exlcusively simple frontal images of the man and the woman punctuated by more detailed images of various cards in the game. The narrator’s story winds around to autobiography and the blurring of boundaries between the game and life. It’s a credit to Turgeon’s writing that the repetitive imagery does not get boring and how effectively the card images work with the narrator’s monologue to suggest untold aspects to his tale.

Vincent Giard’s “Le trou dans les nuages” (“The Hole in the Clouds”) is only four single panel pages, yet it succeeds as a short and mysterious narrative about a strange object on a beach that seems to be sucked up into the sky while observed by a crowd of people. I’m also a big fan of Giard’s style, an unvarying line that is both angular and curved punctuated by black shapes. The figures have a certain cartoony minimalism to them.

Page 28 from Jardin botanique.

Jardin Botanique by David Turgeon (Colosse, 2011) – This book is subtitled “bande dessinée automatique”, automatic comic, which I assume is automatic in the sense of Surrealist automatic writing, where the writer just lets out whatever comes to mind, trying to bring forth the subconscious’s narrative. In this case Turgeon has created an abstract comic filled with organic forms. It does not have the slow transformation of an organic “character” that a number of abstract comics have, rather Turgeon’s images are unstable and shifting never clearly staying long with any single identifiable “character”, hinting at (partially because of the title) trees, flowers, insects. What starts as predominantly vertical images, evoking dense tree trunks, moves through a number of stylistic sections. The verticals slowly give way to smaller rectangular shapes then to scribbled forms that seem like insects flying about. A two page spread is dominated by areas of dense parallel shading. Another section is composed of short hatch marks. At one point I can almost see small, loosely drawn stick figures. Turgeon creates rhythm and motion through the not quite chaos of his pencil marks’ repetition and variation. The gestural marks bring to mind a kind of abstract expressionism in pencil. The cover image rhymes with some of the internal pages but is drawn in a plethora of colors (I can imagine the whole book done this way, it would be lovely). Originally published in 2006, an excerpt from this would have made a nice addition to the Abstract Comics anthology, as nothing in that volume has quite the same feel. You can read an excerpt at Turgeon’s site.

Page 31 from Laisse Tomber les Filles (web version of story).

Laisse Tomber les Filles by Vincent Giard (Colosse, 2010) – A collection of shorter pieces by Giard. Like the comics in Lecture à Vue these stories all leave much unsaid, in this case literally, as the two longest stories in the book eschew any real text. One story follows two men one evening as they walk around town and head into the woods (you can read it online here). Throughout the pages the two men are conversing yet Giard has erased through the center of the text, obscuring the actual words. One can occasionally make out a letter of a partial word, but except for two phrases we are left outside their words. At one point the phrase “Her tiny pyramids” is completely unobscured, while later on the last two balloons in the story are crossed out but readable. I should note that Giard has subtitled the French text with English at the bottom of each page. This text is obscured the same as the text in the balloons. Another story (which you can read here), which starts with the image of empty word balloons popping out the window of a building, takes place at a party where all the word balloons are left empty. The interaction between the characters is almost completely opaque because of this. Two men fight for reasons I cannot fathom. In both stories Giard slips into abstraction for a brief few panels, the shift away from representation echoes the incomprehensibility of the dialogue in the stories. Without really being able to articulate why, I love Giard’s style, especially in that second story, where details seem unnecessary and the lines are crisp yet not too precise.

For some of Giard’s color work, check out this awesome wordless comic.

You can view Colosse’s catalog here. The books are printed in very limited runs, so many of them are sold out (though Cinema, Jardin Botanique, and Lecture à Vue are still available), but they put out new volumes pretty frequently.

I wrote for the zine about John Porcellino’s short comics “Psalm” originally from King-Cat #57 (2000) and reprinted in Map of My Heart (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009). Craig asked for 300 word essays, so I, of course, wrote exactly 300 words.

from Psalm by John Porcellino, Map of My Heart p.140

1: John takes a walk. That’s the story. But this 11 page comic is not about story, it’s about the moment. Underneath the title, Porcellino entreats “please Read Slowly,” advice worth taking. You could breeze through these pages, dismiss it as boring or pointless, but that would be missing the point completely. The point is: slow down, boring is just a lack of looking.

2: On “the first warm night of spring”, John leaves his cat at home and goes for a walk along the sidewalks of his neighborhood. Cars pass; he appreciates a tree; the moon is full in the sky. Back at home, he peers in the window at his cat sleeping on the couch. On his doorstep, he looks up at the stars in the sky. The sound of bugs in a bush attract his attention, and he investigates. He looks back at the stars.

When you pay attention, “Psalm” is about more than just a walk. When you don’t simply pass by, but rather take a closer look, the comic is a beautifully simple meditation. Porcellino’s art is stripped down and, like the story, easy to pass over quickly: thin unvarying lines, no tone, no texture, and simplified–often to the the edge of clarity. The art itself mirrors the story, it is a challenge not to overlook, to spend the time to look beneath the surface for pleasures within.

3: Panel: John shows a sly smile. Panel: We see two sides of John’s house simultaneously flattened into the composition; the corner halves the panel. John stands to the left looking in one window where we see his cat asleep on the couch. On the right side of the panel a window shows the sleeping cat at a 90 degree different angle. That image persists with me.

This ended up being more of a response to Charles’ post on Lone Pine than a review of it’s own. If you haven’t already, go read his post, as he covers all the basics.

Lone Pine by Jed McGowan. Self-published, 2010. Distributed by Adhouse Books.

I’ve reread Lone Pine more times than I can remember now (six? seven?). I love its aesthetics of effective minimalism: flat visuals of depth, images of looking, tones and silhouettes, nature, clouds. Yet I am not sure what to make of it. I keep reading it, but I always end up wondering. The ending in particular defies any narratively logical explanation, though I am not sure any logical ending would improve the book.

McGowan plays against genre expectations in a way I find more effective than Charles seemed to. Lone Pine reads like some kind of modern noir as seen from a very minor character (Jasper), the boyfriend of the protagonist’s sister, the guy that might appear in one scene early in the story as a background figure with a line or two. He really has nothing to do with the troubles: the crime gone wrong, the heist, the double-cross, whatever has gone on that would form the plot. The antagonists admit as much in one scene: they give up chasing him down because he clearly doesn’t know anything. Jasper isn’t really part of that story. He just sees parts of it without really understanding, consequently, without the reader really understanding. And I don’t want to understand. Anything McGowan would have done to fill out the crime drama that goes would have only made Lone Pine more generic (in both senses of the word).

One of the many point of view sequences.

Strangely, while I don’t disagree with any of Charles’ descriptions of the book, its silences, its non-action, its lack of characterization, it’s story that never really jells, I evaluate them differently in the end. I find the non-action a positive aspect, action would be what an action hero, a superhero, would have done, I don’t want to see more of that. I don’t care that the protagonist “doesn’t seem worth reading about.” I could read this book if it were just Jasper wandering around in the words and having abstract conversations with his shadowy woman who cares. I think McGowan works the line between narrative and non-narrative quite successfully through the power of his visuals. He works that line by moving away from the narrative. Don’t we have enough comics that are all about the narrative at the expense of anything else? To me, the narrative, such as it is, reads as rather modern. It’s not following conventions of plot and conflict&em;at least any conflict that arises is quickly mitigated: the chase scene has no chase (the antagonists give up), the car crash is neither shown nor does it seem to affect anyone, at one point a character “may be pointing a gun” at Jasper but is obviously not, Jasper thinks about attacking the antagonists with a stick but he doesn’t. We don’t need these conflicts, we know how they go: “drugs, money stupidity… you can fill in the rest” as Jacqueline says in the story.

Charles notes that:

Lone Pine is a catalog of experiments strung along a vanishingly thin thread of story, the results favoring mood over outcome. Suspended between quietude and mute dread, the book privileges silence (only about a third of its pages include text), and the openness created by that silence allows bemusing effects to proliferate, a showcase for McGowan’s probing of form. The outcomes are often exquisite—but the trick for comics, at least for me, is to counterpose story and graphic effect in a mutually reinforcing relationship, a feedback loop in which each continually reinvests the other with meaning.

While I might not call Lone Pine “a catalog of experiments” I agree with Charles’ sentiments about the foregrounding of form, mood, and graphic effect. Except I don’t feel like that “reinforcing relationship” is missing. To me, in this case, and in many cases, the aesthetic of the graphic effect is enough in conjunction with what story there is to string it together, because I don’t think there is no “counterpose of story and graphic effect,” it is there, but it is weighted to the graphic. In fact, I don’t really see how that weighing of graphic over story is all that different than the all hallowed Kirby, who seems to be appreciated more for graphic effect than any particular narrative skill. Ditto many other comics “greats” (pick your favorite reclaimed/rediscovered comic artist from the past), but the difference being that McGowan is not concerned with placing his graphic effect onto a conventional, plot-based genre story (not that he has totally eschewed that base level, of course, though he does eschew the focus on heroic action). And he is all the more successful for it.

A nice slow, simple sequence.

I feel like any comments I can make praising the visual narrative and aesthetic of Lone Pine would be little more than a list of examples: the use of point of view, the focus on nature, the lovely use of color and tone, the slow and deliberate pacing, the frequent movement into abstraction (particularly in that mystifying ending). All these elements work in conjunction with the narrative’s move away from action and conventional genre plotting, in fact they do much of the work to create those movements. I think Charles hits on a lot of those elements from a formal perspective, making it perhaps a little redundant for me to rehash those aesthetic/formal successes. For a first book, McGowan is exceedingly skilled at working with many formal elements of comics, and I could pull out dozens of examples that work both visually and in keeping with the narrative mood. I have sprinkled this post with a few examples that hopefully will (mostly) speak for themselves.

Great use of patterning in the background of this scene.

Sadly, Lone Pine hasn’t seemed to have gotten much attention since it’s release, perhaps it’s location somewhere between genre/action and autobiographical style realist fiction has turned off readers who don’t know what to do with it. That is to their detriment, for this is a strong comics from an artist worth paying attention to now and in the future.

Other reading: I wrote about McGowan’s webcomic “Ritual of the Savage” at ComixTalk. I’ve also written previously about Lone Pine’s earlier incarnation on the web as “Bluesy Face.”

Here are a few comments that were originally posted at The Panelists:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik:

I have a love-hate relationship with comics anthologies. I can’t seem to stop buying them, yet I’m invariably disappointed with a great majority of the contents of each one I read, leaving me with anthologies I’m saving because of one single beloved story. I’m tempted to just razor out the pages I like, but I’ve never got over my lifelong conception of the book as something that should not be harmed (excepting the occasional pencilled underline or marginal notation, which are, after all, erasable).

Some few anthologies are more successful than others. Why is that?

As I see it, the primary reason is the availability of quality material. Many anthologies often act as a kind of training ground for less experienced artists. Besides minicomics and, now, the web, anthologies are one major way for new artists to get comics out to an audience. Bolstering an anthology of lesser known artists with a handful of more experience/known artists helps attract attention and buyers (especially given the collector culture of comics) and provides exposure. Naturally this will lead to greater amounts of chaff to wheat.

A strong editorial hand is also important. It’s not easy to bring together a bunch of comics by different artists and get them to be a fairly consistent read. I’d imagine it’s also not easy to reject work. The world of comics is fairly small, and a lot of the submitters to an anthology must be friends or acquaintances of the editor. Who wants to reject their friends? Who wants to sour a relationship that could be potentially useful in the future, professionally speaking? Not many people, particularly, in the case of most comics anthologies where the editor is him or herself also an artist. I’d say the prestige of the anthology itself would also assist in the ability to: a) get better submissions and b) make it easier to reject work.

The strong editorial hand and the prestige are, I think, why the later volumes of Kramer’s Ergot are so successful. Even if you don’t like all the work in them, you can, as you read them, get a sense of curation at work. Harkham wasn’t just asking friends to contribute and then taking whatever they gave him. (Well, I assume so, but maybe his friends are just that reliable.) And because of the increasing prestige of the anthology, the artists were probably taking the work more seriously, trying to put a better foot forward, which often seems to not be the case in less known anthologies featuring known artists.

Austin English’s Windy Corner Magazine anthology is also very successful in its three issues because of English’s editorial hand. There is a consistency of the contents that speaks to the editor’s control. Windy Corner also features a limited number of participants in each volume, which seems to raise the quality. So many anthologies just have too much, too many artist to fill the pages (the quintessential example being L’Association’s Comix 2000).

Access to a variety of artists would also add to an anthologies chances at success. The Rosetta Anthology from Alternative Comics managed to have an incredible roster of international artists. Check out volume 2, edited by Ng Suat Song with Domingos Isabelinho (who both now write for The Hooded Utilitarian), with work by Anke Feuchtenberger, Martin tom Diek, Feng Zikai, Tobias Schalken, Edmond Baudoin, and tons more; it’s a strong anthology. The Drawn & Quarterly anthologies also tended to have a great selection of international and historical contents. In both these cases the anthology’s goal seemed less about new work and more about expanding horizons, a kind of cultural education.

Following this overlong preamble, I wanted to take a brief look at four anthologies I’ve read in the past month or two. Why did I buy them? What did I like best; what worked for me? I’ll try to admit to my particular prejudices as I go through them.

First up is, Closed Caption Comics #9, an anthology from the Closed Caption Comics collective (group?). I’ve heard a lot of hype about CCC, so I thought I’d try out this latest volume. This is not so much an edited anthology, as an anthology of work from the group (unless I’m understanding wrong, but no one is listed as the editor), which I guess invalidates my comments above about editorial hand. Much of the work in this volume sets off a bunch of my existing prejudices as far as taste in comics and narratives go. Many of these comics work within or use the tropes of the horror genre. I can’t think of a genre I like less than horror, I just never got into it. There’s also some Burroughs-esque science fantasy (as in Edgar Rice, not William S.) in here and some pieces playing with the action adventure genre. I guess this is the new art genre comics (or whatever you want to call the creation of genre comics from non “mainstream” artists), which isn’t to my tastes (interesting to note that the genres in the cases I can think of tend to be action/horror/sci-fi/fantasy, rather than mystery or romance or…). But there are a couple stories in here that kept this book on my shelf. The first is actually a sort of horror comic from Chris Day. I’m pretty sure it’s Chris Day. Few of the stories have names attached to them, and the table of contents is just a list of the artists in order of appearance. So you have to count your way through the book or find an artist you can identify already to figure out who is who (tables of contents and attribution of stories in anthologies are pet peeves of mine, I shouldn’t have to put work into figuring out who did a comic I like).

from Chris Day's "Moribund '74" in Closed Caption Comics 9

Day’s piece “Moribund ’74″ (see above) is a series of semi-abstract imagery mixed with narrative text. Day mixes expressive ink strokes with geometric precise lines, recognizable figures or objects with abstract patterns and textures. Yet, he manages to maintain a certain stylistic continuity. There is nothing that would be considered conventional narrative sequencing, but one can piece together a narrative of sorts through the textual narration, which does use a consistent narrator (at least there’s nothing that leads me to believe the narrator isn’t consistently the same narrator). Mentions of “Sharon”, “Roman” and the 60′s hint at the Manson murders. What looks like a cabin with an old iron stove points to a horror trope (like in Evil Dead), but the images and the narration never get too explicit. The comic is visually striking, with its almost violent slashes of black ink, and narratively unconventional, an intriguing read.

Molly Goldstrom (see above) is the one artist in the book I’ve seen and enjoyed the most work from. Her short comic (untitled as far as I can tell) is visually representational but makes wonderful almost abstract use of repetition and patterning. A man is out skiing and Molly treats us to panels of patterned snowflakes and pine trees, panels dense with slightly varied forms followed by a sequence of individual large snowflakes. The man dreams of a lush spring forest and a woman. The narrative is slight, but the imagery is powerful.

This is immediately followed in the book by Conor Stechschulte’s detailed renderings of a forest, one image per page (see above). These seem to be excerpts from his “Silence Country” work, where he drew from photographs taken every 3-5 steps of a walk through the woods (he’s also done a similar project as a minicomic/zine titled “Spirit World”). The images have a lot of depth and are vaguely haunting. Another great example of a walking comic (a genre including some of Porcellino’s work like “Psalm”, Oliver East’s Trains Are… Mint, and Taniguchi’s Walking Man).

Gazeta: Comics From Bangkok to Belgrade (some samples at that site) edited by Lisa Mangum and Maria Sputnik attracts for its international roster and more particularly work from Edmond Baudoin, Ron Regé Jr., Dylan Horrocks, and Amanda Vahamaki. I had high hopes for this anthology based on the international flavor, but little of it really came together for me. The Baudoin piece, even with my limited experience of his work, feels like something I’ve read by him before with unreal women, affairs, and chance meetings (though if you haven’t seen any of his brushwork, you should check it out). The Horrocks story is one I’ve already read on his website, making use of his imaginary Cornucopia country. The Vahamaki stories (two of them) have that nice pencil drawing style of hers but I don’t feel like the narratives are successful. The other pieces are often, to my tastes ugly, or narratively weak. The reason I kept this book around is for the Regé comics (see above), 10 pages (oddly missing from the table of contents) of the work he’s been doing lately adapting mystical literature (perhaps part of “The Cartoon Utopia”?). I don’t buy into the philosophical/theological content of the work but the way he illustrates it is fascinating. The content provides a great platform for Regé to mix his figural work with the abstraction and patterning that he is so skilled at. I expect there’s a book of this we’ll see at some point in the future, but in the meantime this is one of the bits and pieces that have been appearing in anthologies, mini-comics, and online.

I liked the dark and thick visual style of Portugese artist André Lemos (see above), but I can’t make much of the narratives. This is, I think, the case of an anthology where the hand of the editors is strong (they certainly are pulling from a wide swath of artists, which is admirable), strong enough that my lack of enjoyment of much of the anthology is caused by their tastes not matching up with mine. Which is to say, the work seems to be quality for what it is, but what it is is not for me. You may decide otherwise. It is good to see a new anthology in English that is not all artists from the U.S. or Canada, so I hope there will be future volumes of Gazeta.

Study Group 12 #4 is an anthology edited by the artist Zack Soto. What really got me to order this one is the appearance of Richard Hahn (see above). Hahn has an absolutely amazing comic in Windy Corner Magazine #2, and he doesn’t seem to be doing a lot of comics lately (he’s also in the Abstract Comics anthology), so I had to see his piece. It also helped that the anthology includes work by favorites Aidan Koch, Trevor Alixopulos, and Blaise Larmee.

Once again a lot of the work here was not to my taste. The cartoony grotesque style (as I’ve just decided to name it) of artists like DeForge, Vermilyea, Clotfelter, Cilla, Gazin, and Root is prevalent in a lot of the art, a style which I do not find aesthetically pleasing, but if you do, this anthology may be a lot more enjoyable for you.

Hahn’s short piece is not as successful as some of his other work I’ve read. It is drawn and paced well, but feels rather empty, almost like an extended gag. Koch’s piece is a good example of her short poetic work. Alixopulos’s three shorts (see above) are my favorite from the book. I find it hard to describe what it is about his work that draws me to it. His work teeters on the edge of an allegorical meaning, while the art combines a exaggerated and simplified cartoon style with great page design and a restraint that leaves enough unsaid to remain a bit mysterious. I’m honestly not sure what to make of Larmee’s piece which features his familiar girl character walking through hallways of what look like empty comics panels and then stopping to dance in front of an image of Charles Schulz.

The anthology is printed in an attractive purple color reminiscent of old “ditto” machine (aka the “spirit duplicator”) ink with a heavy silkscreened cover. I find the texture of silkscreen ink really unpleasant to the touch, something that always turns me off from work with these types of covers. Silkscreen is not really a tactile medium, and I find myself not wanting to hold this book. I can see the draw in making use of silk screening’s multi-color graphic qualities and its handmade quality, but it just doesn’t work for a book cover (compare the feel of a silkscreened cover, for instance, with one of Highwater’s publications which always used nice textural paper, and you’ll feel the difference).

Ghost Comics edited by Ed Choy Moorman is the only themed anthology of the bunch, its theme being, obviously, ghosts. The artists make broad use of the theme running the gamut from literal to metaphorical ghosts. There’s a lot of mediocre work in this anthology from artists I’ve never heard of and artists I am sometimes a fan of. What got me to order this book was the inclusion of Warren Craghead III, Aidan Koch, and John Hankiewicz. All three tend to work in a less-narrative more poetic form of comics that really appeals to me. There’s also a Porcellino page, but it’s a reprint from King-Cat (and found in Map of My Heart).

The three artists that brought me to the anthology, thankfully, deliver. Koch’s piece (see above) is a 7 page comic that has her normal use of pencilled drawings, textual narration in panels, and elliptical narrative with indirectly juxtaposed images. It’s also a little eerie with images of toothy mouths disconnected from any body and empty staring eyes. An interesting element of its construction is that you can see the ghost of other pages in the background of the photographic reproductions. I keep looking at Hankiewicz’s piece trying to figure it out and I just can’t. But I keep looking at it. It interestingly combines his more realistic hatched drawing style (like in “Amateur Comics”) with his looser and rounder style (as in the “Dance” comics).

A piece I liked from someone I haven’t heard of is a repeated sequence of a single image (once per page) by Jenny Tondera. The image sits small on the page and is accompanied by small amounts of text. Over the course of the pages the image fades in repetition to nothingness. It’s a quiet piece with an evocative textual narration which nicely fits the theme through the sequence itself.

The real star of the book, though, is Craghead’s 14 page “This is a Ghost” (see above). It’s drawn in a similar style to his How to Be Everywhere, precise pencilled images that sit on panel-less pages. The pages are lightly composed, averaging three images each with no real panels. Craghead repeats certain imagery, in particular a robed figure that looks like its head and shoulders have been edited out in a favor of a rounded top that brings to mind a child wearing a sheet as a Halloween costume. Hands reaches out from the robe. The text is slight, often repetitive. Craghead makes you work to read it by spacing out many of the letters, often to the edge of incomprehensibility. As a reader, you have to recreate the words, a process which slows down the reading, forcing attention, and setting a certain rhythm to the text. The words that are left whole read faster than those broken apart. The broken up words are also at times used to move the composition around the page and between the images. This use of text is reminiscent of concrete poetry more than traditional comics in this respective.

In a recent interview Craghead reveals that this piece is inspired by Giotto’s frescoes of the life of St. Francis, which confirms the vague religious iconography I thought I was seeing in the imagery. The hands reaching out from the robed figure often look like some kind of benediction is being offered. In one case the hands hold a chalice. The mixing of religion and ghosts adds to the potential readings of the work. It’s a beautiful piece, worth reading and rereading, and on it alone, I’d say: “go buy this anthology.”

A few comments from the original post at The Panelists:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik:

Noah Berlatsky:

This post is part of this month’s Manga Moveable Feast on Kozuo Amano’s Aria (currently (?) published by Tokyopop). For more entries in the MMF, visit Animemiz’s page on the feast. I’m not getting into a lot of plot or character summary here, but there’s plenty of it in the other posts. You could also check out the previous times I’ve written about the series in 2005 (Aria v.1-3), 2009 (Aria v.5) (I appear to be on a 2 year cycle) which have a little more plot description (and you can see some of my changing opinions of the series as I read more of it).

Kozue Amano’s Aria (the the two volume predecessor Aqua) doesn’t look like, nor does it sound like, a book I would enjoy reading (and rereading as it turns out). It’s a big-eyed manga about girls whose goal in life is to be great at piloting gondola’s in a futuristic Mars city designed to replicate 19th century Venice. Yet, it’s a series I now have 8 volumes of (more than any other manga except Phoenix, Nana, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Vagabond) all of which I’ve read at least twice. I’ve read the rest of the series in scanlation. [1]  I’ll try to avoid “spoilers” for the 6 volumes that don’t have official English publications, though I can’t think of a comic that would be less affected by knowing how it ends, as I can’t imagine anyone whose read the first few volumes who couldn’t guess where it ends. [2] I will use a few examples and images from later volumes but nothing extensive, though I think some of my points are clearer the more you’ve read of the series.

For a manga, Aria fits oddly with existing genres. Tokyopop labels it “Sci-Fi/Drama”, which is technically true though perhaps a bit misleading. As I’ll discuss later, the science of Aria‘s “sci-fi” is, if not completely absent, only a minor part of the series, more background than integral to the story or even the characters. And to call Aria “drama” is to use that word in only the lightest of senses, it is the least dramatic manga I can think of, excepting perhaps Jiro Taniguchi’s Walking Man. Even the quiet and slow (but beloved) Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Ashinano Hitoshi has an element of dramatic disintegration at work over the course of its story. Aria is almost absent of romance (more on that later) or much in the way of conflict. Instead it is primarily an evocation of both the everyday (at least a very particular sense of the everyday) and the passage of time. It is a most undramatic form of bildungsroman, telling the story of Akari, a young gondolier in training, and her friends as they learn their trade. If nothing else, we can say that the overarching story of Aria is about time passing and how to best spend and appreciate that time.

As such, repetition and variation are integral to the series: visually, narratively, and thematically. Visually, there is a frequent use of non-exact repetitions of certain imagery: characters standing erect on gondola’s as they glide through the water in a state of bliss, cityscapes, seascapes, skyscapes dotted by floating weather controlling ships, sunsets/rises, smiling and laughing faces, superdeformed characters showing their angry faces. There are also some striking scenes of exact repetition. Early on volume 1 of Aqua, two of the protagonists, Akari and Aika, gondoliers in training, get lost in a labyrinth of water-filled passages inside a building. To visually hammer home the disorientation, Kozue uses a series of page spreads that are almost exactly the same (remember to read right-to-left, click for larger views):

The first image in each spread starts off each spread back at the same spot, and the following two panels on the recto also closely mirror each other. The whole of the recto pages in the first two spreads are also almost exactly the same visually, with only slight variations in character position and differing dialogue to let us know it is not a misprint. This use of repetition works well to emphasizes the strangeness of the situation (lost in a labyrinth), but also works with the greater themes of the book.

Narratively, the story itself offers a repetition of situations, shifting out characters, locations, or times of the year, but offering familiar situations. This can work both for and against the narrative. The reader may get bored with the sameness (as I did on occasion), but the repetition also plays in to some of the greater thematics of the series.

Thematically, repetition is a touchstone for the heart of the series and its use of time, not only through seasons but also in the way the two generations of characters (trainees and mentors) are depicted.

In my most recent reading of the series, in preparation for this article, I finally noticed that each volume of the series marks one season in narrative time. With each new volume Akari (our protagonist and primary narrator) announces the arrival of a new season. This assures the reader’s attention to the passing of time and the growth of the characters (such as it is) and also nicely mirrors our segmentation of the year into the segmentation of the story. Time passing is closely tied with the series use of repetition and the thematically primary nostalgia that suffuses the series. Narratively, Kozue also uses seasons as a generator for stories. A great many of the stories revolve around season specific festivals, events, and nature (weather, animals, etc.). One chapter (49) in volume ten actually recapitulates a whole years worth of time by passing through each of the seasons.

The protagonists and major secondary characters in the series are all so-called “undines,” gondolier tour guides, divided into three younger trainees (the real protagonists) and three older mentors. As the series progresses, Kozue plays up the repetition in the larger strokes of the two generations’ lives: their friendships, career paths, and futures. This repetition and the opportunity it provides for the older generation to see themselves and their pasts in the younger generation and for the younger generation to see their future and, even more so, their present as a past time, is the greatest (and most moving) generator of nostalgia in the series.

The nostalgic core of Aria is impossible to ignore. All the larger elements of the story emphasize nostalgia and force attention to it on the reader. We can start with the setting of the series, Neo-Venezia. The city, found on a terraformed Mars of the future (2300 C.E.) renamed “Aqua”, is a recreation of 19th century Venice, a city from a previous century (to the reader), existing in a world centuries ahead. This situates the story both in the past and the future of the reader, a perfect location to best evoke nostalgic longing. Neo-Venezia, as is noted numerous times in the series, is essentially a “backwards” place existing with the perks of a science fictional technology, yet culturally and aesthetically maintaining the “charm” of a vanished (and certainly non-existent) past. Technology brings a clean, healthy world, shorn of any sign of poverty, homelessness, disease, or war, with weather controlled to be perfect seasons. Culturally, the city exists without motor vehicles of any sort (excepting flying machines that provide transportation of goods), without any visible phones (ok I just found one in volume 10, it has a crank, separate ear and mouth pieces, and two visible bells on top), televisions, or other trappings of contemporary or future technology–excepting Akari’s laptop, an object she brought from Earth. Earth itself is portrayed, through narration and dialogue (it is never shown), as an artificial world where everything is controlled by machines and no longer “natural” (Akari has never swum in a “real” ocean). One story is devoted to Akari assisting a mailman as he delivers letters and an evocation of the wonders of paper mail, because, while Akari’s narration is provided in the form of emails back to a friend on Earth, the people of Neo-Venezia prefer to use paper mail.

Narratively, a number of stories explicitly rely on the nostalgia theme. It is explicitly mentioned in a scene early in the series in Aqua volume 2:

As noted above, the younger generation of characters are themselves a source of nostalgia for the older generation, while the older generation’s nostalgia puts the younger into an increased sense of the fleeting nature of their present. Their place as trainees, i.e. students, also evokes a great location of nostalgia, school, a period that is always limited in time, guaranteed to pass, and so often looked back on with a nostalgic glow.

This is perhaps most explicit in the first chapter of volume 6 (which is just at the middle of the series (2 volumes of Aqua and 12 volumes of Aria, means volume 6 of Aria is actually volume 8 out of a total 14)) where the six undines are gathered together for the first time. The older generation (admittedly, older seems to mean early 20s in this story) tell the younger about how they met. This story clearly mirrors the way the younger characters met in earlier volumes. The younger characters note this in the story. What disturbs the characters is the way over time the older generation got so busy with their work that they don’t get to see each other very often, when, as youths, they spent every day together training (as the younger generation do throughout the series). This sense of change and lose is closely associated with the nostalgic longing, time passes, life changes, and those situations where we considered ourselves most happy seem to gain luster by their distance.

The sadness of nostalgia and change is countered by the didactic content of the series, an example of which can be seen in this very scene. The older generation offers the younger generation advice on enjoying the present:

I should note that this scene (again, situated at the center of the series) is repeated in memory in the final volume of the series, with this same advice replayed, further showcasing this as a core scene in the series.

Similarly, in contrast to the nostalgia, Aria frequently calls for the appreciation of the present as fleeting moment to be enjoyed to the full, a call that is the series other main theme. Akari as a personality is often shown with, and admired by the others for, her ability to find pleasure in the everyday and to make the most of her experiences. Her enthusiasm for life, people, and the world around her becomes infectious both to the other characters and acts as a draw for the reader. As an example, in volume five a whole chapter is devoted to Akari and her enjoyment of waiting: “I love to wait. I relish little pockets of spare time.” (154)

This pleasure in life is often found in beauty, scenery, and the scenic view. This is the aspect of the series that many reviewers focus on, the phrase “scenery porn” comes up a few times, and it is an aspect I focused on with my first reading. It is also more prominent in the early part of the series, before Kozue has had time to grow the themes of the series and the characters’ relations. Akari is often shown in rapture at a wonderful view (cityscape, sunset, the sea, rainbows, buildings, etc.) and I assume the reader is supposed to share in these feelings, but Kozue’s conventionally realist manga backgrounds (thin lines, clearly photoreferenced, ziptones) don’t really convey that sense of aesthetic wonder that one feels on seeing the real thing. One thing art can do is to reframe and reimagine these natural wonders in new expressive ways. Art is about how the thing is represented not necessarily what is represented. I find less realistic artwork is often more expressive and aesthetically moving in this respect, particularly when the object of representation is something out there in the world that is aesthetically stunning on its own. For instance, Oliver East’s watercolors are rarely realist, but his images of nature, buildings, even wind (realist art can’t really draw wind) are visually exciting. Aria’s artwork is too often too real but plain to be aesthetically surprising in the way Akari, the character, sees the objects represented.

For instance, the scene shown above where Akari is watching fireworks and is told about nostalgia, the fireworks themselves just don’t really work as a wonderful image in themselves, making it harder to share Akari’s enthusiasm. Similarly, in volume 1 Akari discovers a rainbow in the water she is using to clean her gondola. Her excitement just can’t be matched by the representation itself:

It is to Kozue’s credit that she often can pull off these scenes not with stunning imagery but with the combination of the imagery and the characterization. Often the art is more striking when the scene is not about the natural beauty of the scenes itself, but rather some other aspect, like this striking scene from v.10 where the frozen moment (important in the story) and the visual angle work together to make the image moving:

Kozue is also skilled in setting up some of the more fantastical scenes that go on in the book, like the labyrinth scene above. A similar scene finds Akari and her mentor Alicia on an island designed like a traditional Japanese shrine setting. As the characters walk through the torii the scene again creates a sense of disorientation and confusion that is quite lovely.

So this appreciation of life and the moment is not always successful when Kozue focuses too much on the view itself, rather her strength in the series is making use of the characters and their interactions to control the reactions to various scenes.

The idea that people are in charge of their own happiness is also frequently evoked through out the series by different characters. All this didactic content is certainly a positive message to try to convey to the reader and indeed forms one of the larger themes of the series, but these ideas are undercut by the relentless sunniness of the series. As noted this futuristic city shows no sign of homelessness, poverty, war, violence, or any negative effects of technology. The setting is basically a utopia, though it is also, despite the theme of change that runs through it, strangely static, as we see neither births nor deaths across the 4 years of narrative time.

Nor, along with birth and death, is there any real sexuality in the series, though there are clear gender related issues. The primary characters are all women, though a few recurring males are seen throughout the series. Akari’s best friend Aika has the only hint of romance with one of these males, a romance that is so innocent and unspoken that it is almost not there. One of the males also has an endless crush on one of the older undines, but it is primarily played as a joke. In fact, the male characters as a whole are portrayed as unserious characters and with seriously weird looking appearances. The main women are all attractive–and in this odd fantasy they must be to have the jobs they have–within the bounds of the style (big eyes, lots of hair, impossible figures) while the men are all odd and caricatured, one of them barely looks like he belongs to the same species as the women.

The roles of the genders in this utopia are also backwards (as perhaps befits the nostalgic setting but not the futuristic one). We are at one point told that the gondolas the undines use to give tours are the only boats women are allowed to pilot in the city. And in chapters where the girls see the work that their male friends do (one works in a floating ship that controls climate, one underground in a place that controls gravity, and another is a flying delivery man) there is no indication that women perform any of those jobs.

That a series so focused on happiness and the pleasures of daily life, starring teenage girls is so void of romance is a bit odd, but romance would also introduce drama and the potential for heartbreak, which would break the fantasy. And the series is essentially a fantasy. It’s least successful moments are where the fantasy of a science fiction utopia is given a layer of mystical fantasy elements. A few chapters in the series make use a mythical giant cat figure (I’ve gotten this long without mentioning the predominance of cats in the series, there are a number of them) and events Akari witnesses or participates in that are only explainable as fantastical. These elements are out of place in a series that is otherwise so focused on finding the special moments in daily life.

In the end, though, I find Aria a unique and moving series. Over the course of so many pages there are many scenes that are worth rereading and Kozue is very successful at creating a rapport with the characters that she can build up to a very moving finale (which hopefully we’ll see in a real English printing some day).

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Images from Aria v.1 are from the ADV edition. Images from Aria v.10 are from the scanlation. All other images from the Tokyopop editions. For volume and page references, the image files are named in the format TITLE_VOLUME_PAGE.

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Addendum: Apologies if some of these points are not as clear or supported as they could be. I didn’t want to miss my deadline! And maybe some other time I’ll connect Aria’s nostalgia to the aesthetic concept of mono no aware, but that would take a lot more time (and rereading of some references).

Addendum 2: I didn’t find a good place to complain about how Tokyopop’s edition provides no translation of the sound effects. For such a quiet series, the sound effects are pretty important. For instance, not the lovely long effects in this spread:

Those characters represent the sound of a special chime that is the focus of the chapter. In many other cases I was unable to tell what the effect was supposed to represent. I’d have loved something like the notes used in English translation of Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering.

Addendum 3: I also wanted to reiterate my absolute confusion at Tokyopop’s rating of this series as “Older Teen Age 16+, May include: Non-sexual nondescript nudity, mild fanservice, alcohol use.” Having read the whole series twice (and some volumes more times), and leaving aside what “nondescript nudity” could be, I didn’t see any nudity of any kind of the book. Nor would I classify anything in the book as any but the mildest of fanservice. There is one chapter at a beach with characters in bathing suits, but it is hardly exploitive. There is one chapter in a bathing house that is positively tame (everyone is in very chastely worn towels). There is some alcohol use but it is extremely subtle (you can see the wine bottles). It’s baffling.

[1] I read the scanlations after ADV stopped publishing Aria after three volumes. Aria‘s publication status in English has never seemed very secure. ADV cancelled it after three volumes and Tokyopop’s edition seems to be in a constant state of pending cancellation. It was put on hiatus on one point, and lately volumes have come out only once a year. As of right now, it’s not clear volume 7 will ever appear. Sean Gaffney gets into the publication history (including in Japan) a bit at his post.

[2] SPOILERS: There’s an alien invasion and all the girls’ gondolas turn into giant fighting robots… (that’s a joke).

I started my post on Mark Laliberte’s Brickbrickbrick by noting the publication’s context as a book labeled “poetry” from a literary press. His most recent publication Grey Supreme 1 is published in a rather different context. That “1″ alone tells us something. This is the first of a projected series of annual issues of Grey Supreme. The publication is a slightly larger than normal 32 page pamphlet from Koyama Press. Koyama is not exclusively a comics publisher, but they have, up to now, published more comics than other books.

Does this context help make the reading experience of Grey Supreme more of a comics-esque one than Brickbrickbrick? For most readers, I think it would. This looks and feels like a comic (a nicely printed on thick paper comic). But inside, we find something that is a bit alien as a comic (well, for most readers, I would think). The comics in Grey Surpreme have more in common with abstract comics than conventional narrative comics, despite the representational imagery used by Laliberte.

Grey Supreme 1 contains two works, which are independent but also offer some thematic connections. The majority of the publication contains “Swallow,” a 19 page series of images showing a single arm reaching out of water. The image is an oft-seen shortcut for a person drowning, a last reach for air as he/she goes down.

The images in “Swallow” are at their heart, two-fold: an arm/hand and the water/ocean. Within each image the styles of these two part are varied, as they are also varied from image to image. Quite like Brickbrickbrick, this appears to be in some way a manipulation or redrawing of appropriated imagery, collaged together. Some of the images have that craggy edge to their lines that speaks to an enlarging of ink of paper. Some of the images are digitally precise; some look like old engravings; some are flat colors; some are digital gradients; some are abstracted patterning; some are traditionally representational rendering. One clearly shows the texture of paper beneath and pale flesh of the arm.

The collage-like stylistic contrast within the same image creates a sense of disconnect between arm and water. The arm and the water are not unified, the arm is like an alien object stuck through the water. The two elements are in conflict visually and narratively. Visually, the arm is winning, as it becomes the foreground, the focal object for each image. In contrast, narratively, the water wins the conflict. The arms struggle to reach out, and, in the last image, there is no arm at all, just the water, with three inverted arcs signifying waves but also looking like an abstracted smiling face. This slightly creepy final image, reading like the final victory of the water, is followed by a poem titled “Swallow” or maybe “Sleepy, Hollow” (“Swallow” is printed in white at the top of the page, while “Sleepy, Hollow” is printed in all caps at the start of the text). The short poem, all short words and rolling rhythm, plays as a fitting denouement to the sequence of images. There is the potential for a poem placed at the tail end of an image sequence to feel tacked on and unnecessary, but Laliberte succeeds at this gambit. The poem faces the armless ocean image and is printed in text the same color as the night sky about the ocean, creating a visual unity to accompany the thematic one.

One other aspect of “Swallow” that adds to its effect is the rhythm of the images. The sequence is made of two single page images followed by a double-page image followed by two single page images, etc. Like the rhythm of the poem, a perhaps another indicator of Laliberte’s poetic background, this adds a rolling water motion to the sequence, a steady pace that becomes familiar and comforting.

The second piece in “Grey Supreme” is a seven image photographic sequence showing a view outside Laliberte’s window titled “Double Rainbow.” A large pit in the earth foregrounds graffitied buildings, construction machinery, and a low skyline. From the expansive sky over the scene, a rainbow arcs just off-center. The image is repeated seven times, each one manipulated to be tinted, in sequence, each of the seven colors of the rainbow (thus the title).

By itself, “Double Rainbow” is a quick recognition of the amusing concept followed by a sense of the thinness of it all. But, in conjunction with “Swallow”, the resonance allows for a greater appreciation. If “Swallow” is a struggle between man and nature, where nature is victorious and fearsome, “Double Rainbow” shows us a more complicated case where man seems to be winning over nature physically, while nature takes an aesthetic lead. In “Swallow”, water is an overwhelming force, in “Double Rainbow”, water is the purveyor of beauty in a single drop.

“Double Rainbow” also ends with a page of text, though this text seems more like a title page/addendum than the text in Swallow. The page lists the location of the photograph and a brief explanation of a rainbow. It’s not clear that’s it meant to be part of the sequence, and it doesn’t read as such.

I mentioned above that “Swallow” has more relation to abstract comics than conventional narrative comics, but I don’t think it is completely divorced from narrative work. Allow me a tentative attempt at explanation… Abstract comics foreground the visual elements of comics as visuals. From panel to panel, or page to page, we read the images qua images, not as a sign of some narrative/diegetic meaning. A more convention narrative comic foregrounds the meaning behind the images. This isn’t to say the images aren’t appreciated or read for their visual qualities, only that that is not the primary motivation.

“Swallow” exists somewhere between these two points. By repeating the same content in a variety of styles, Laliberte pretty much forces the reader to read these images as more than just the signifiers of arm/water. A focus is placed on the way the arm/water are represented, on the formal qualities of the line/color/texture/composition as well as the pacing of the images through the pages. Yet, behind these repeated images there is a narrative, however slight, that can be constructed, read into the repetition. What really makes it a narrative, to me, is that last image, the one without the arm. That shows change on a different level than the rest of the images. They all change on a purely stylistic visual level, but that last image creates a narrative change, and through it retrospectively creates the whole sequence into a time sequence. It is not just a series of arms in water, it is an arm over time, struggling in the water, then… failing.

At least that’s how I read it.

Prince Valiant from Dec 1, 1940

This time around my One-Page Criticism looks at a more conventional comic.

Foster, Hal. Prince Valiant #199. Dec 1 1940. Reprinted in Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 (Fantagraphics, 2010).

I’ve written about Prince Valiant a bit before (here and here), but when I finally decided it was time to get a few of the volumes of this new edition, I was won over again by Foster’s epic series. Compared to the volumes of the previous edition I have (not covering the same episodes, but close enough in time to them) the reproductions are stunning: the colors are more vibrant and nuanced, the lines are more consistent with much less dropping out (my scan does not do it justice). You also get two years worth of comics in a single hardcover volume, plus introductions.

Instead of writing about the series as a whole (or at least, those volumes I have read), I decided to do another one-page criticism. After much debate with myself I selected the page above, dated December 1, 1940, appearing at the end of volume 2. In some respects this is a typical Hal Foster page, but in many ways it is not, which is partially why I chose it.

Unlike a lot of comic strip reprints, it is not easy to forget in reading Prince Valiant, that this was a serialized newspaper comic (I hesitate to call it a comic strip, since it is consistently a full page rather than just a strip). The prominent header is ever present and often varying. The little portraits of Prince Valiant and Boldoro are typical of the pages. Up until shortly before this page, all four corners of the page held a tiny image, either a portrait or an object, enclosed in a stamp-like border with the label “Save this stamp.” At one point Foster switches to the less prominent use of two images in the header. These ever changing, paratextual elements consistently bring the original context of the page back to the mind of the reader.

At the bottom of the page we also find the “Next week” prompt, a reminder that Prince Valiant was a weekly comic, appearing each Sunday only. Not unlike the weekly serialized television shows of today, Foster begins each page with a block of “Synopsis” text that attempts to keep the reader up to date. Though, with this example being rather typical, the synopsis only really serves to update the reader who might have missed the past page or two, providing little else in the way of context. A new reader approaching this page, might think Boldoro, so prominently featured in the header and here accompanying Val in the first panel, was a major character in the strip, yet his name and face have only just appeared in the previous page as an otherwise unmentioned and unseen “squire.”

Foster sticks to variations of the nine panel grid for his page layouts. After the regular nine panels, this variation, with a double-sized panel ending the page, is one of the most common layouts, offering a steady pace of narrative but ending on a slightly expanded image which is often a cliffhanger or a lesser version thereof. In this case the final panel also serves as an expanded field for placing Val in a location (location and setting are important throughout the series).

Prince Valiant always starts out a little dense, as the opening panel must hold not only the synopsis text but also the first image and the first block of narration. Foster rarely if ever lets an image go by without some amount of narration. These narrative captions have been the source of some “Prince Valiant isn’t comics” arguments. The method is, even now, quite rare in comics, but to my mind is very much a comics method of organizing image and text. In some ways, Foster’s work is a kind of reverse illustrated novel. Can there by any argument that the images are the real focus of Foster’s narrative, the focus of his art?

The narration in its prevalence does offer Foster a great flexibility in how he tells his story: allowing him to provide non-visual information (thoughts, feeling, speech (since he eschews word balloons)), call attention to certain parts of the image, provide details missing from the images (since he rarely uses close-ups of people or objects), greatly vary the flow of time, as well as create the sense of a story being told. Prince Valiant in its epic and mythic qualities places itself in line with textual and often oral tales of the past. The foregrounded narration seems appropriate to this tale, moreso than if there were word balloons and caption-less images.

Because of this narration, time can be quite fluid in Prince Valiant, and this page provides a great example of the ways that occurs. The first four panels on the page make up a rather conventional action scene. Val and Boldoro are chased by Roman soldiers and make an attempt to trick their pursuers by having Val hide while Boldoro goes on with the horses as a decoy. We see Val on his horse, then off, then hiding behind a rock as the soliders pass, then walking off as the soldiers chase Boldoro in the distance. These events all happen in quick succession and are easy to follow panel by panel even without most of the narration, which isn’t to say the narration is useless. Panel one sets the scene, and offers us new information on Val’s pursuers, panel two provides dialogue and the plan, and panel four clarifies the result of the plan. Only panel three seems redundant, providing no added information about the scene, but in its presence maintaining the telling of the tale.

Panel five takes a completely different tact with time and space. From the close cut scenes of pursuit, the center of the page finds us faced with an image of the roguishly grinning Baldoro, seen in close-up for the first time, against a almost harsh yellow background. The narration extends Baldoro’s story past Val’s ken. “They say” he became a prosperous brigand. This information is in no ways essential to the story, but it continues the illusion of a storyteller who is narrating. By imposing the “they say” into the text, the illusion of someone, a narrator, to hear that “they say” and report it back, is created/reaffirmed.

From the first action scene to the central ambiguously placed panel, the last three panels take a less consistently watched pacing of time and setting. Panel six shows us the Roman soldiers, for the first time without Val in the panel (and clearly outside his point of view, for if Val is the protagonist he is not the narrator or the focalizer), as they continue their search up the volcano’s side. Panel seven returns to Val, somewhere else on the volcano, but now time has moved forward a distance to the night. Then the final panel eight jumps forward again to the next day. The narration carries these panels forward through time, as without it, the images’ time-space location would remain ambiguous (the coloring of panel seven (on which more later) to me looks less like “night” than some hellish cavern).

So we can see how the narration can work in different ways even over the course of a single episode/page. But the real draw in reading a Prince Valiant page is the images, and we can see many of Foster’s strengths and weaknesses in this page.

Foster is a master of figures and placing them in space and relation to each other. He seems to be even more successful the more of the figure he uses. His panels showing full figures and groups of full figures feel more vibrant and believable than his attempts at close-ups. While the central panel in this page is not the best example of this, it does point towards the odd, almost humorous quality his faces take on when he draws them large. They have an exaggerated character to them that is successful when drawn as a small part of panel, when we are seeing the full (or most of the) figure and the face is only one element. The exaggeration is then needed to read the expressions. But drawn three or four times larger, this exaggeration become caricatural, theatrical, like a theatrical star acting for the first time in an early film. I find these images jarring in Prince Valiant, out of place with the more sedate realism of the other images.

On the other hand, look at that mastery when he is drawing those figures in panel six. Each is unique in posture and attire and clearly placed within the space. And that space they are in… Some of most stunning parts of Foster’s pages are the backgrounds: the castles and forests, the ships and oceans, the mountains and streams. Foster often combines four or more parts of his nine panel grid to showcase a sweeping view of the landscape. And it is in these landscapes that the strength of his rendering and ink work really shines, his versatility from a detailed and worked realism to a simplified and beautiful abstraction. The contrast between these two poles of his style often creates vast depth in his panels, bolstered by the coloring.

Panel four provides an example on this page. The foreground area around Val features fine line work, hatching, texture, spot blacks, and a variety of hues and tone. But as the eye moves up the panel, into the background of the diegetic world, the rendering is simplified, the coloring is flattened, a powerful example of atmospheric perspective.

What, in the end, made my choice to write about this page, is the last strip of panels. Panel seven is not only a striking example of Foster working in a higher contrast inking style, but also a sumptuous example of the coloring. Based on an interview in the first volume of this edition, the coloring was at some point done by Hugh Donnel, though the introduction to the same volume notes that Foster’s son Arthur also assisted with coloring. So with the information I have at hand, I’m not clear how much Foster himself had to do with the coloring. Whoever did the coloring, did a fantastic job. The colors on panel seven, as I noted above, bring to mind some kind of hellish scene, a darkness lit by fire. The reds blend into blues, on a purple background, simultaneously warm and cool. Over the background purple, a grey haze floats, adding to the mood.

Panel eight is a stunning follow-up to the previous darkness. Day has risen yet Val is still in a hostile, hazy landscape. We can see here an example of the texture Foster could bring to his drawing. The varieties of hatching density, direction, and stroke-length separate the cliffs from the steam/smoke that suffuses the panel. That steam/smoke has such character, particularly in the area around Val where the hatching is lightest, working in contrast with the opposite end of the plume limned only by the coloring. The color here is also more than impressive. Not only the the yellow and white that shapes the nearest plume, but the mottled colors that make-up the rocky ground around Val and above the narration. At the center of the panel, the rising volcano seems to contain and exhale every color in the rainbow in subtle tones. (Unfortunately, my scans do not accurately catch any of these hatching and coloring details. Get the book!)

Having gotten this far without really addressing the story itself, what can I say? Prince Valiant is a skilled and engaging genre piece. As I noted above it, to this point at least though I expect it does not change, falls into the lineage of epic and mythic tales: closer to Homer and Malory than Tolkien, Howard, or any contemporary fantasy. A strength of the story is Foster’s attention to historical detail and mixing various historical times and places into a unified story. As an ongoing epic, Foster can easily shift gears between a variety of moods and plots: romance, comedy, war, court intrigue, etc. And by focusing on a single protagonist, there is plenty of room for a constantly shifting set of secondary characters and locations. It’s a fun read, though it would certainly be a much lesser work without Foster illustrative skill.

In a continuing series of posts on works that might not be comics (but, then again, they might be), but are in some/many ways fall into the same family. Series title still pending…

Back in March of 2009 Domingos Isabelinhos posted the “Anthologie de la Bande-Dessinée” from the French comics magazine Dorénavant, edited by Barthélémy Schwartz and Balthazar Kaplan. Their anthology is decidedly outside what just about anyone else would come up with. It included a number of works from the fine art world that would not be considered comics (Andy Warhol), those clearly influenced by comics (Keith Haring), and a few works conventionally considered comics (Verbeek, Swarte, Fred, Pratt). One of the names that was unfamiliar to me on the list was Deborah Turbeville, who occupies three of the thirty spots on the list.

A little research (more than usual though, as — a rarity these days — there is no Wikipedia article on her (which I must attribute to the fact that she is a female photographer working in fashion, a crossing of areas in which Wikipedia does not excel)) taught me that Turbeville is a photographer who has been working since the 70′s. She started out as a fashion editor and like many photographers works both in the gallery art world and for fashion magazines. Her works are figural and often narrative. She at times mixes text with images and lays out her photos into multi-photo conglomerates that bear a clear resemblance to a comics page.

The book I have, Deborah Turbeville: Past Imperfect (1978-1997) (Steidl, 2009), covers series of works from two decades. It’s an unusual volume, not your traditional art monograph that has essays and metadata on each image, instead the photographs fill the book with almost no commentary (except a few reminiscences by Turbeville herself). Even differentiating one series from another becomes a bit tricky when titles seem to be interpolated at the end or in the middle of the series.

Rather than attempt to discuss the whole book, I thought I’d look at a few pages from two different series. This first page is from the “Glass House” (1978) series, at least I’m pretty sure it is. It’s the only part to feature this man, but is preceded and followed by photographs featuring the same women in the same glass house.

The Glass House (1978), fig. 1

This is most of one page from the book (the book’s just a tad too big for my scanner) and is juxtaposed on the left by a single large photo, which I believe is just a blow-up of the image in the center of this page. Part of the ambiguity of this volume are these larger images, sometimes they appear to be the same as a photo on an accompanying page, perhaps to act as a detail, sometimes they seem to be purposeful repetition as part of the series. Turbeville does use repetition frequently throughout these series: it can be seen in this page where the upper right and lower left images appear to be the same photograph printed differently.

I’ll assume the visual connection to comics is obvious here. Based on the collaged nature of the photographs and the ground upon which they are placed (tape, pieces of a dress/clothes pattern), these images are meant to be seen this way. That is, it is not a juxtaposition created for the purposes of publication (i.e. an art book where a few images are placed on a page to conserve space). Turbeville has grouped these images in a specific order to create some narrative sense.

The narrative that evolves on this page is narrative at its basest level: this then that; time passes; change occurs. But there’s no direct story as such. The man walks through the overgrown vegetation, apparently from a house (seen in the background of images 2, 4, 5, and possible in image 1) to the glass house in the last image. The page ends on an moment of expectation, an open door, a beat. Hergé placed those moments at the end of a page in his Tintin comics to create suspense for the next page, but here any suspense is deflated, leaving the reader with ambiguity and mystery.

The turn of the page finds a large image of two women (seen in previous pages) in the glass house. The man doesn’t appear again, though in the pages/images that follow I can perhaps detect some kind of grim tale playing out.

The following spread includes five images. First we see the two women (who are the primary subject in the pages preceding the above example) in the glass house. Then we see then in close-up looking towards the camera/viewer, as if confronting another person. This is followed by three images showing them slumped on top of each other on some kind of counter running along the wall of the glass house. End sequence.

The man doesn’t appear again, though in these subsequent pages/images I can create a grim tale playing out. Does this man represent an intruder, some kind of killer (note the close show of his hands, above, perhaps a strangler) who does away with the two women in the glass house? It’s not clearly so, but it is one possible interpretation.

As with many other marginally comics-esque works, I find myself “reading” these images as I would a comic, in a left-to-right top-to-bottom order. That’s how I generate the above described narrative. But is that necessarily the way to view this page? I don’t know. Once I’ve built this narrative I find myself hard-pressed to diverge from it. I can’t deny that the pages, at least, ask to be read in order, as a sequence. Unlike “Magic Forest” there are repeated characters and backgrounds, so I feel the need to form those repetitions and variations into a time-ordering.

The next pages are from a later series, that are not identified in the book, but the website for the exhibit this book is based on labels them as “The Staircase” (1980):

The Staircase (1980), a page from the book, fig. 2

The Staircase (1980), a page from the book, fig. 2

This series featuring two (or more?) women in a circling stairwell. Once again the structure of their grouping points to an unified composition. Interestingly enough, I find myself less able to “read” these pages as ordered than the previous example. While there are clear repetitions of character and setting, even repetitions of the same image (first page third image and second page eighth image are the same image printed in reverse and negative), the image to image connections are less direct and orderly than in the first example. The viewpoint jumps around, the characters act in a less direct way. Here there is less in the way of narrative. Turbeville is creating atmosphere, more so than linear narrative.

On the exhibit website I found this image that shows one of the above examples (fig. 2) in a slightly different version (perhaps how it was shown in the gallery):

The Staircase (1980), a image from the exhibit, fig. 4

While most of the images are the same, a few are different between the two versions. The fifth image in the book version seems to be pasted over the image in the gallery version. This points to a fluidity in how Turbeville lays out these works. They are not fixed creations but in some amount of flux. One could easily imagine taking all these same images and putting them in a completely different ordering.

Again, similar to my first example, when placed in spreads, there is a large image repeated opposite these groupings:

The Staircase (1980), a spread from the book (including fig. 2), fig. 5

The large recto image is a blown-up copy of the image just left of it in the middle of the verso. The woman’s face is ambiguous though she appears worried or apprehensive as she looks back over the other images.

I find these up and down stairs images quite evocative. There is something mysterious about them, and also a sense of morbidity. A veiled woman in black appears a few times (clearest in the eighth image of the first page), suggesting mourning. The women seated on the stairs are in an in-between place, neither here nor there, up nor down, at one point seen as if spying between the balusters to somewhere below, like children watching their parents late at night after they’ve been sent to bed. The image in the lower right corner of fig.3 has a fantastic appearance. The central woman’s head and neck seem curiously distended, as if her head is almost floating off her body or her neck was replaced by a ceramic vessel. The large image that accompanies this page on the verso side of the spread shows a woman on the stairs who looks as if her face were carved in stone.

Turbeville alternates between cropped close-ups and medium-long shots, making it hard to connect the faces to the bodies. How many women are there in these images? At least two, but perhaps three or four. The tightly cropped close-ups of the faces also add to the tension of the images.

The images are grainy, blurred, printed too dark or too light (for conventional standards), defeating any easy examination of the details. They evoke the poorer technical quality of the photographs of decades (or a century) earlier. By doing so, the images become less the object of individual scrutiny and work better as parts of a whole. They take on a stylization, a certain level of abstraction, a hazy atmosphere.

More than anything else, these images are about the atmosphere and evocative feeling, often a sense of darkness and mystery. They are not exactly full narratives. They are not exactly descriptive: the style defeats any inclination to really see the people, the clothes, the objects, the rooms or buildings. They are more in the realm of the poetic, where the repetition and juxtaposition of visual elements builds meaning. A number of these works appeared in various Vogue magazines (Italian, French), and it makes me wonder about the narrative elements of fashion photography (a subject which I know nothing about).

The way she combines the photos and the way they are printed foregrounds the physicality of the photographs as objects and the process involved in their creation. The pins, clips, and tape manifest the contingency of the sequencing. These images are not like a film of quickly ordered time. They do not hide the editing, rather it is made quite clearly exposed. By printing some of the images with the sprocket holes and frame numbers showing, not only do we clearly see the origins of these images as photographed images, by we can see the way the images have been juxtaposed in a different ordering than they were taken. Note in the second example how the first image is frame 13, the second is frame 2, the third is frame 26.

Unlike Mark Laliberte’s visual poetry, Turbeville’s work bears no connection to the cultural product that is comics (unless (doubtfully) there were some early influence, as Turbeville is old enough to have been young at a time where there still were comics targeted at girls). Yet, if we think of these pieces in relation to comics, they offer an example of a path little trodden, both narratively and visually. I can see some relation in the works of Aidan Koch which are often semi-narrative and atmospheric, focusing on figures and scenes. In some sense these works also bear some resemblance to the works of Mat Brinkman, where strong narrative is foregrounded by environments, figures, and strong stylistics, though Turbeville is much less linear in her narrative structure. In the way she pushes forth the work as object and process though, these pieces are very much outside most comics work, though Jason Overby has made some pages that push in the direction of a collaged object moreso than a printed work.

A few comments from the original post at The Panelists:

Andrei:

Derik:

Greice Schneider:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik:

Andrei:

Charles Hatfield:

Robert Boyd:

patrick ford:

Charles Hatfield:

patrick ford:

Andrei:

This isn’t a comic. Or is it? Does it matter? I’m really not concerned with definitions (at least, not recently), but I am concerned with stretching the limits, expanding the family that is comics.

Mark Laliberte’s Brickbrickbrick (BookThug, 2010) is labelled “poetry” on the back and published by a literary press specializing in experimental literature (primarily poetry). Yet, the connection with comics is unmistakable, and I can’t help but read it as comics, as perhaps a poet would find herself reading it as poetry. I’m not really familiar with the concept of visual poetry (which this book is, I understand, an example), my knowledge of poetry at all is surely a bit above average (which isn’t saying much) but nowhere near the point where I would even say I’m well read. So I can’t address this book as poetry, but I can address it as comics, of which it is an abstractly immersive example.

BrickBrickBrick consists of nine titled sections of 8-12 pages each. Each of the pages shows a single square image of drawn bricks accompanied by a single word above it. Going into the book (and the reason I originally searched it out), I knew that the brick images were all appropriated from a variety of comics. The words above each image, one quickly realizes, are the last names of the source artists, which show a great range from the familiar to the unknown (to me at least), including Schulz, Clowes, McKean, Gerhard, Bachalo, Herge, Verbeek, Vaughn-James, Barks, Miller, etc. I’m guessing many of the ones I am unfamiliar with are French artists from the mainstream (of which my knowledge is limited) or perhaps even mainstream American artists (ditto).

From 'The Sleepwalkers' section.

While the images at first might look like simple appropriations without the hand of Laliberte himself, they are in fact much more of a construction than that. In a brief video interview posted by his publisher, he explains that the images are a product of copying, erasing, drawing, shifting. Laliberte has constructed his own walls from the bricks of cartoonists. Yet, those bricks still retain the stylistic markers of their original sources. And one, immediately perceivable, reading of this book is as a series showcasing, through the simple and easily overlooked brick wall, a stylistic microcosm of all those artists. The high contrast Miller, the sharply inked Burns, the white-on-black scratching of Ott, the smooth simplicity of Barks: the style of each artist is, in some ways, hidden within these images, outside the bounds of figuration where the most recognizable stylistics of a comic artist usually lie.

At this level alone, the book is an engaging read. As a dictionary of brick drawings, it provides a lesson in varieties of line, texture, and form. But, these images of bricks are organized, both into the named sections and within those sections. The images within each section often share certain visual connections. For instance, the “Urban Gothic” section contains dark images that have show textured line work or a sense of wear (cracks and the like). “Sleepwalkers” is primarily images with shadows on the bricks. “Past Midnight” has images that are primarily black. Beyond this visual grouping, the order of the images within the sections seems to be quite purposeful.

From the 'Into the Wilderness of Everyday Life' section.

I first noticed this sequencing in the “( Wal (l) ow )” section which starts with images that have a vertical emphasis, switches to those with horizontal emphasis, and then to those diagonal and more chaotic. “Tetris in a Tempest,” a series of unfinished walls and those with missing pieces, ends with “Barks,” a brick wall showing a single hand, holding a brick, coming into the top of the image about to add another brick to the wall. Admittedly the connections are subtle or perhaps even primarily created by my own desire to see sequence where there is only series (that is, to see an order where this is only contiguity). But there is an unmistakable rhythm to moving through the images that is outside of any narrative sense. These sequences have very much in common with abstract comics, where the thrust of narrative in sequence is replaced by purely visual (repetition/variation) means of connection.

Only after multiple readings of the book did I find the video interview (see above) wherein I learned that Laliberte considers each page its own poem, while I was reading each grouping of pages as the poem. My tendency to “read as comics,” looking for sequence/series/juxtaposition, created a different work, or at least a different emphasis than intended. It speaks, I think, to how much “comics” is about reading protocols (which got touched on a bit in the comments of my last post). Is it comics because I can read it like comics? How much does my method of reading change the work? Some of the books in the Abstract Comics anthology rest in that grey area, where, depending on your approach, they either read as comics or they read as drawings/paintings/illustrations. A series of images could just be a bunch of images next to each other, or they could be a comic, a narrative, a sequence of some kind. If I read them as sequential, if I make my own connections from one image to the next, have I changed the work?

Brickbrickbrick itself provides an interesting metaphor for these shifting readings, through the movement from part to whole. If most comics rely on the panel as a building block (multiple, sequential, iconically solid(arity)), the images in this book are themselves formed of small parts built into a whole. Laliberte didn’t just copy brick wall images, he builds them anew brick by brick. And if he (again see the video) sees them as words building a poem, I (again with the different reading) see them, metaphorically, as panels in a comic. Oddly enough, I can’t read those bricks like a comic. I can’t read each one brick by brick, left to right, top to bottom. To me, they read as a whole, single image, one my eye moves around, if not randomly then at least with no set path. It’s only at the next level that I begin to see the order and conglomeration of multiple, sequential parts.

I shouldn’t fail to note how lovely the images in this book are. Laliberte has done an amazing job putting these images together, they are seamless, only occasionally are repeated brick obvious (at least, when I was really looking for them). Any drawing work he has done shows his skill at pastiche. And in the end, there is something comic-ally (comic-esque) primal about these brick walls, harking back to the bricks of Krazy Kat, the conversations atop a brick wall between Charlie Brown and Linus, or the brick buildings lurking in the background of scores of superhero fight scenes.

You won’t find this book in your local comic store or probably most bookstores, so you’ll have to go right to the publisher for a copy (link above where the book is first named), and I think it’s worth the investment.

A few comments from the original post at The Panelists:

Robert Boyd:

Derik Badman:

Charles Hatfield:

Charles Hatfield:

Robert Boyd:

Charles Hatfield:

Caro:

Charles Hatfield:

Noah Berlatsky:

Caro:

Robert Boyd:

Charles Hatfield:

Robert Boyd:

J. Overby:

Caro:

Charles Hatfield:

Charles Hatfield:

Caro:

J. Overby:

Noah Berlatsky:

J. Overby:

patrick ford:

Charles Hatfield:

J. Overby:

patrick ford:

Nick Sousanis:

Derik Badman:

Nick Sousanis: