Happy Halloween!

Greetings, friends.  'Tis the season of the ghoulish and macabre.  Which is to say, for most of us, our favorite holiday.  The veil between worlds is at its thinnest in the time of Samhain.  Restless spirits wander the world, ready to make mischief and play tricks.  And ain't that a treat?

I've always enjoyed the transgressive holidays, which mostly means Carnival and Halloween -- those times of the year roughly coinciding with the equinox when we celebrate excess and our darker drives.  The globe shifts on its axis and it seems like we are willing to contemplate less ordered, less constrained ways of being.  Ignore these seasons at your peril.  At the very least, we all need an opportunity to blow off a little dark steam. 

In Carbondale, the university used to shut down the dorms and send the students home for Halloween.  We have a bit of a reputation for riots.  That's going a bit far, to be sure, but there is always something in the air.  Maybe when you put on a mask you feel like you can get away with anything.  Maybe we all crave a little chaos.  Anarchy rules, with most of us preferring Aleister Crowley's abbreviated version of the Witch's Rede:  "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."  The full Wiccan Rede comes with a bit of a caveat:  "These Eight words the Rede fulfill: An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will."  Something worth remembering when the spirits of the night encourage you to throw a brick through a storefront window.  Or worse.

I prefer to let the call to transgress manifest in art.  Costume parties are a fun opportunity to build a concept onto my body.  Cards and posters are a fun opportunity to play comic arts.  We used to decorate our house, but have let the workload eclipse this opportunity for seasonal play.  Still, every now and again, I hang a Blair Witch cluster of sticks and bones in a tree around town -- the simplest decorations often being the creepiest.

It's a beautiful fall weekend, folks.  Don't let this day and night pass you by.  Carve a pumpkin.  Celebrate the harvest.  Light a bonfire (but be sure to tend it).  Play dress up.  Play a gentle prank.  Dance skyclad in the moonlight.  And when the devout hypocrites accuse you of inviting Satan into your heart, remind them that most of these rituals are about tricking him into passing you by.  He prefers the shriveled hearts of those who forgot the divine charge to "judge not lest ye be judged."    

Another Dream -- With Color and Without

The vibration spread out across the universe, distorting wit and structure.  No rhyme, no reason...a train of thought in space, a toss of hollow dice.  Shadow and light.  Those who see do not smile; those who don't, lose perspective.  And if I listen really close, I see thunder. 

The Flexible and The Strange

The tag line of this blog: "Be Flexible.  Be Strange."  I like to imagine that as something of a life philosophy.   My interests are wide-ranging.  I like to think I can adjust to most situations.  And the strange part?  Well, that mostly happens without my attention or conscious effort.  Mostly, I mean don't be afraid of being strange.  Don't shy away from doing something just because it is not how others would do it.

That's not to say I don't learn from others.  That's not to say that doing things differently from everyone else is the only valuable way to be.  Trust me, I spend plenty of my life conforming.  But sometimes it's wise, productive, and best to heed to that inner voice that wants to go its own way -- regardless of whether that way is different or strange.

Probably one of the most frustrating questions an artist gets is "Where did you get that idea?" (or possibly, "Why did you do it that way?").  I put it right up there with the most annoying question you can ask a performer: "How did you learn all those lines?"  I guess the only way to really answer any of those is: it's just what I do.  This time, anyway.

If you find these cartoons cryptic, know that you are not alone.  I don't know what they mean.  I don't know where they came from.  I don't know why I did them this way.  They are largely unplanned.  Just ideas put to paper and then digitally processed.  All along the way, I let my interest and sense of the appealing guide me.  I break some "rules" here and there.  But mostly they are what they are -- me playing around.  Me stretching my abilities and interests.  Me courting the strange. 

Colorful, aint it?

 

Doodle or Die

But what does it say?  A log, a pipe...but this is not a pipe, right?  It's a sketchbook page.  No, it's a scan from a sketchbook...digitally edited and colored.  It's not abstract enough to be an abstract comic.  It doesn't play with words enough to be a poemic.  Maybe it's just another doodle.  Maybe it's just a visual stream of consciousness drawing.  Maybe it's crap.  Maybe it's just a blog post.  And, of course, none of these possibilities are mutually exclusive.

And for those of us who prefer our world less colorful...

Found 01

Mirro-Krome Card.  H.S. Crocker Co., San Francisco.

On a recent day-trip to Cape Girardeau, I enjoyed perusing vintage post cards in one of the many antique malls downtown. I like gathering cartoon post cards because they offer interesting source material for line-work techniques.  I also like them because they offer hints at differing fashions, technologies, and both shifting and universal humor.  To the best of my abilities, I locate these cards as circa 1940s.  I dig the camping equipment!  And the humor is much more risque than my grandmother ever led me to believe was popular in the 1940s.  None of these cards were actually mailed, though.  I wonder if they were more often collected than sent, an underground amusement.

My digital work has led me recently back into mail art.  I am making my own post cards now to send to friends who, in turn, send me little capsules of their own work.  Fun to imagine what might become of those as the minutia and ephemera of our day find their way into someone's packrat house and eventually an estate sale and flea market.  Years from now, what sense will collectors make of our sense of aesthetics and humor, our taken-for-granted technologies of exchange?  Hard to know, but fun to speculate.

Plastichrome.  Coulourpicture Publishers, Inc., Boston.

 

Kromekolor Comic Card.  Noble, Colorado Springs.

 

Plastichrome.  Colourpicture Publishers, Inc.  Boston.

Cyclops Rabbit -- A short comic

 I am stuck at home, supposedly grading and finishing the semester.  Of course, what that really means is that I am avoiding grading and thinking about all the art work I want to be making once the semester is put to bed.  And here is a page work up of a character that came to me while I was not grading yesterday.  If the cyclops rabbit is looking for a brier patch, I clearly am looking for fantasy escape from the mundane work that insists on occupying my attention.

Okay, back to the spreadsheet.  And hopefully tomorrow it will all be done!

Stranger Phantoms -- An Abstract Comic

Stranger Phantoms

I've been enjoying the work and commentary over at Abstract Comics a lot this week.  As with probably all artistic practices, there's a certain amount of disagreement as to what does or does not fit.  Andrei Molotiu tackles this conundrum in the first paragraphs of his introduction to the anthology, Abstract Comics.  First, he defines the genre:  "sequential art consisting exclusively of abstract imagery" (1).  Quickly, though, he adds: "the definition  should be expanded somewhat, to include those comics that contain some representational elements, as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative or even into a unified narrative space" (1).  Fair enough.

In setting up the framework for what will be included in the anthology, Molotiu then moves to firm up the definitional boundaries from the other side of the fence, identifying what abstract comics are not.  "What does not fit under this definition are comics that tell straightforward stories in captions and speech balloons while abstracting their imagery..." (1).  Got it?  Got it.

Still, disagreements at the blog continue to emerge, with the desire among some for a "unified rhetoric" and "clear definitions" that clearly mark what is and is not an abstract comic.  Apparently, it matters whether you consume your abstract comic fat end first or narrow end first.

Okay, I kid (and with allusions to Swift), but I also find the conversation fascinating.  I don't mean to disparage those who are working out the parameters of an emergent genre.  I also think there are several unremarked assumptions in the discussion.  For example, there is a kind of formalism at work here that wants to make these assessments of the work itself, but where are the boundaries of that work?  Does it include the frame(s)?  The title?  What the artist says about the work?  

Take the following work posted at the Abstract Comics blog by Rappel:

 

Seems to fit the definition, right?  But what happens when you learn that the title (at least in the blog post) is "natural sequence/river"?  Does that frame turn it from an abstract composition to a narrative of reflections on the water?  If so, that seems like a lot of power for a title.  Then again, George Lakoff has spent the better part of an academic career informing us about interpretive frames and how they guide our perceptions.

What Rappel's comic and the discussion that followed on the blog revealed for me is that the definition of abstract comics (and probably any art, for that matter) resides somewhere between the object/image and its reception (c.f. Roland Barthes distinction between "work" and "text").  If human beings really are the storytelling animal (Homo narrans), we will always at some level defy Molotiu's anti-narrative clause in the definition of abstract comics by reading narrative into the play of images, especially if they come in sequence.  Yes, there is a difference between the clear cues of narrative content and the reading practices of individual viewers.  Even so, the boundary between between those story-sources is murky.

I am not really invested in pinning (or penning) down a definition of anything.  For me, the practice of naming and defining is about what it encourages me to see.  In the art world, I think it is also a call to defy, to push at boundaries, to try something different.  And so this discussion has.  

Return to the top of the page and consider my abstract comic, "Stranger Phantoms."  I am sort of hoping you already have, because now I am going to add another interpretive frame to it.  This is a bricolage/collage piece, re-purposing and re-framing panels from classic "Phantom Stranger" comics.  In their original context, the panels were elements of fantasy stories.  Here, they have been reworked with more attention to composition and value progression than telling a story.  The Stranger's powers are mystical and supernatural -- he is not your typical superhero and is a quaint anomaly in the DC universe.  In depicting his stories, artists often rely on surrealist and even abstract representation.  By no stretch of the imagination do I posit these comics as originally presented as fitting Molotiu's definitions for abstract comics.  But in "remixing" the originals, I hoped to create a product that at some levels plays with process, with the idea of abstract comics as a way of viewing as much as a kind of art "thing."  I do not discount what my selection, framing, and positioning have done in the creation of an abstract comic.  On the other hand, I also note that the abstract qualities of this composition were, in part, always already available to me in the source material.

So, (how) did that paragraph change the way you view the comic? 

Poemics?

I thought "abstract comics" was a big discovery (for me) of new directions in comics arts.  And then I come across this other term, "poemics," as a direction several comics artists and poets are pursuing.  Usually short pieces (often related to abstract comics) that combine poetry and comics, several examples can be found on the web, especially at the blog poemicstrip.

What fascinates me about this is that I think I've been doing this all along.  The piece above might be a bit of a stretch for a poemic, but I doubt it.  Certainly, when BAR Corporation was publishing conceptual art cards on the Comics page of the Daily Egyptian, I think many of those qualified as poemics (although they tended to be single panel works while most poemics seem to work with sequenced images).  So, with that in mind, I've included several of my contributions to the BAR Corp project below.  And well, I suspect I'll be working more with abstract comics and poemics in the near future.

 

A Rag Man

Space Limitations 

The Ballad of Baudrillard

Abstract Comix

I call it, "Siphoning Gutter Blood."

I recently went to Chicago for a professional conference.  While there, I stocked up on independent and arty graphic storytelling.  Probably one of the more interesting phenomena I learned about is the realm of "abstract comics."  I was introduced to this practice briefly in a two hour "short course" on teaching comics as communication offered by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (based on their textbook) at the National Communication Association Conference I was attending.  I later picked up Andrei Molotiu's excellent anthology, Abstract Comics, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  Since returning home to both my computer and my drawing board, I've enjoyed viewing Molotiu's blog, Abstract Comics: The Blog.  And of course, I've enjoyed trying my hand at the form.

My above foray into the realm of abstract comics is influenced somewhat by Andy Bleck's contributions to Molotiu's anthology.  I like the idea of making the frame in comics more organic, imagining each panel connected (like former AK Senator Ted Stevens's description of the Internet) by a series of tubes.    In the comics industry, the space between the illustrated panels is called the gutter.  Scott McCloud, the ultimate meta-guru of comics, considers at length the role of closure in "filling in the gaps" presented by the gutters between panels.  Here, I've offered a bit of plumbing for those gutters, albeit more like alien arteries than down spouts.

I'll probably keep playing with this format, so look forward to more abstract comics pages in the future.

I call it, "Texture with Ghosts."

Hmmm.  Have I found something on the boundary

between abstract and conceptual comics? 

I call it, "Movement of a Simple Thought."

A McCarthy Comic

So my not-so-secret dream is to be a cartoonist.  I don't mean as a profession necessarily, but just as a regular practice in my life.  It seems like a blog is as good a place as any to post work, and so here goes.  I doubt you can read the following short comic as it reprodces here, but if you click on it, hopefully it will enlarge to a more reader friendly size.