Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Abstract Comics? Not By A Mile!

I'm reading the monumental Abstraction And Comics (Volume I) published by the Presses Universitaires de Liège and the Cinquième Couche and I'm surprised to see that those who wrote the essays barely mention any abstract comics and those who drew and wrote them created no abstract comics at all. This is strange indeed...

Flipping through volume one, I see: "O Arco Da Noite Branca" by Diniz Conefrey, an untitled comic by Renaud Thomas, pages by El Lissitzky and Jean Ache, comics by Jessie Bi, comics by Kym Tabulo, a couple of pages by Benoit Joly, a page by Mark Gonyea, a few pages by Gene Kannenberg and that's about it in a 450 pages book.

It's baffling to read this, for instance: "Here we encounter tall buildings, rising water, a dog that gets encapsulated by strands of material that solidify out of smoke or streams of ants." (286) If we encounter all those things one thing we certainly don't encounter is abstraction, that's for sure...

By the way, the opposite of "abstraction" is "figurative" or "representational," not "narrative." The least we can say is that this is a "creative" use of words...

More later...