All PostsContent Topic: abstraction
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Abstract Comics Follow-up
Over at The Comics Journal, Kent Worcester offers some commentary on the Abstract Comics discussion from the other week. I should clarify that the Trondheim piece in question (from La Nouvelle Pornographie) was not necessarily a candidate for the book (I have no idea). It is a book of its own published by L’Association. I’d [...]
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Haiku and Haiga
I was up in the stacks looking for books on sumi-e, when I discovered Haiku and Haiga: Moments in Word and Image (Hotei, 2006; ISBN: 9789074822862). I wasn’t familiar with the term haiga. Turns out it is a haikai poem accompanied by an image. In this catalog of haiga, the works are usually haiku accompanied [...]
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Exploding Head Man by Jason Overby
Overby, Jason. Exploding He[a]d Man. Self-published, 2009. 96p for $6 from discretefunk.com. This is going on my best comics of 2009 list, no question. Jason Overby impresses me more and more with each new comic of his I see. (Beautiful piece in the Abstract Comics anthology, by the way.) I’ve been sitting on this one [...]
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Warmer and Little Flashes by Aidan Koch
Sometimes I read a comic and it reminds me that comics can be narrative without being clear, character driven, or plot-based. Comics narratives can be abstract, allusive, elusive, elliptical, yet still visual rich and… poetic. Warren Craghead’s work always brings this to mind, though I’ve yet to manage a post on his How To Be Everywhere which will do justice to the book. On some recommendation–or perhaps I was just ordering some other minicomics and wanted to make the postage worthwhile–I bought a copy of Aidan Koch’s Warmer a few months back. It got lost in the piles and shelves of my office until her name showed up again online, first at Arthur Magazine (where Jason Leivian of Floating World Comics in Portland does some comic editing) and then at TopShelf 2.0 (both actually showing the same short comic). So I reread and reread.
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Lone Wolf and Akira
Besides my ongoing reading/blogging on Tezuka’s Phoenix, I’ve also been making my way through two other “classic” manga series: Koike and Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub and Otomo’s Akira. These three works are very different creatures on many levels, but primarily for me in my changing and opposite reactions to re/reading them.
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Briefly: Reich 6
Issue 6 of Elijah Brubaker’s Reich just arrived from Sparkplug. I’ve been reading and enjoying the series since it started–one of the only serialized pamphlets I still get–but haven’t had the time to write about it. Brubaker’s got a great style, geometric, hatched and patterned, with the occasional burst of abstraction and expressionism.
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Beanworld Book 1: Wahoolazuma!
Marder, Larry. Beanworld Book 1: Wahoolazuma! Dark Horse: 2009. $19.95, hardcover, 272p. 9781595822406. I discovered Beanworld back in the early 90′s just in time for its original run to come to an end. I found a few of the last issues in the cardboard long boxes of my local comic store, and for a long [...]
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Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara
Urushibara, Yuki. Mushishi. 10 volumes in Japanese. 6 volumes in English to date. Del Rey, 2007-. I looked around for reviews of this manga series. Six volumes have come out from Del Rey, yet I can only find reviews of the first (with some minor exceptions where the reviewer just summarizes plot). People seem to [...]
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Solipsist’s Doodles by Jason Overby
Overby, Jason. Solipsist’s Doodles. 2008. 5.5″ x 8.5″ mini, 32 pages, $2.75 from his site. After I wrote about his previous mini, Jessica, Jason Overby was kind enough to send me his most recent publication. While I was impressed by the style and disappointed by the story of Overby’s last work, the three short stories [...]
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Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
Shaw, Dash. Bottomless Belly Button. Fantagraphics, 2008. 9781560979159. $29.99, 720p. If I summarized the plot of Dash Shaw’s brick of a comic, Bottomless Belly Button (henceforth, BBB), it wouldn’t sound like much. Three grown-up children return to their family home for a week to learn that their aged parents are getting divorced, psychology ensues, then [...]
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Helen Lundeberg
Sonic Youth‘s most recent album, “Rather Ripped,” has a song called “Helen Lunderberg”. Over an almost tribal marching band drum the lyrics begin: Helen Lundeberg illusory landscape five decades of paint A couple of weeks ago (yes, it took awhile for me to post this) I finally looked up the name. Not surprisingly, Helen Lundeberg [...]
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3 Appreciations of Frank Santoro – 1
[This was originally written in the summer of 2007 for a print publication. Since it has yet to appear, I'm posting it here. I'm going to post each of the three parts as a separate post during the course of the week. While they are part of one piece, they are also independent.] My enthusiasm [...]
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Spuk (Thesen gegen den Fruhling) by Niklaus Ruegg
Rüegg, Niklaus. SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling). Zurich: Edition Fink, 2004. ISBN 9783906086743. Almost all comics are figurative (that is, representational). More than that, the greater cultural awareness of comics is through characters. A great swath of the field (comic strips, comic books, manga, bd) is covered by the neverending (or nearly neverending) narratives of [...]
