In the comments for this particular drawing, a reader (Sarah from Everyone Can Draw)--besides mentioning this very blog--writes: "You are so good at simultaneously suggesting a narrative whilst denying it. Amazing."
Reading that, I realized that it can be seen as, more generally, a quality of all abstract comics--one of the ways in which abstract comics function: the suggestion of a drive forward, a movement, something that tells you something is happening, but without really stating or explaining what. Long before I had read that comment I subtitled one of my pieces (now in Nautilus) "a vague epic," and I realize now I was getting at the same kind of quality.
If I'm not mistaken, this is not far from what Roland Barthes called (for the literary text), "signifiance" rather than "signification." Not settled meaning, but the active process--in poetry, for example--of words bumping into words, sounds against sounds and connotations against connotations, from which meaning arises. One of the things that abstract comics can do is isolate and foreground this "signifiance" in comics.
This can be expanded, leading the way to an even more complex understanding of what abstract comics can do (and, in the process, hopefully addressing Draw's wishes for more writing on Ab Cmx); I'll save that for a later post. Let me just say that I've always thought of Barthes' notion of "signifiance" as somehow related to instrumental music--the way instrumental music can have a (formal) narrative, without ever exactly stating what the story is about. There are many other parallels between abstract comics and music that need to be drawn out and investigated, and this would be a good starting point.
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