The challenge of mixing words and images (both abstract/ used abstractly) is getting them to touch or bounce off each other, getting them to interfere with each other's boundaries, getting them to trample or jump over the border between their separate rooms. Not the familiar redundant translation/ illustration gambit, not mirroring each other, but animating each other. I was thinking about this as I was making 'As The If And'.
The first and most comprehensive source of abstract comics on the web, tracing the history and surveying the contemporary landscape of abstract sequential art.
The artists assembled by Andrei Molotiu for his anthology ABSTRACT COMICS (Fantagraphics, $39.99) push “cartooning” to its limits... It’s a fascinating book to stare at, and as with other kinds of abstract art, half the fun is observing your own reactions: anyone who’s used to reading more conventional sorts of comics is likely to reflexively impose narrative on these abstractions, to figure out just what each panel has to do with the next.
The collection has a wealth of rewarding material... it is a significant historical document that may jump-start an actual new genre.
It becomes a treat to take a page of art - or a simple panel - and consider how the shapes, texture, depth, and color interact with one another; to reflect on how, when one takes the time, the enjoyment one ordinarily finds in reading a purely textually-oriented, narrative-driven written story can - with the graphic form - be translated into something completely different.
...this arresting book is like a scoop of primordial narrative, representational mud. Which is to say, it has vitaminic powers.
For years, comics (at least American ones) have doggedly refused for one reason or another, to consider other schools of art and beyond mere representation. It's only now we see artists attempting to branch out and try to push at the edge's of the medium's definition. As such I found Abstract Comics to be a revealing, thought-provoking and genuinely lovely book that I'll be sure to be rereading in the months to come.