Gavin the Grasshopper enjoys abstract comics

I was reading "Monkey Business" by Wallace Edwards to my son tonight, when I noticed something interesting on this page:



Look at one of the comics on the bottom left. Here is a detail, turned 90 degrees for your viewing enjoyment:



This is clearly a grasshopper with good taste--after all, right next to that abstract comic is an issue of "Waw," no doubt edited by Ant Spiegelman.

strand

this is a comic from lumakick #1. i think i drew it in the summer of 2002, which is a little while ago. i titled it strand at the time but would probably call it something else now

Please welcome new blog contributor Nina Roos!

I have mentioned and praised Nina's work in several previous posts. Nina has been introducing sequentiality into her abstract work for a while now (the earliest example I can find on her site is from October 2008) and, if I dare say so, discovering our blog seems to have brought new impetus to this trend in her work, which has yielded beautiful results in the last few months. Now Nina, who lives in Holland, tells me she is working toward gathering her sequential pieces into a comic-book, which I, for one, can hardly wait to see. If I had know of her work earlier, she would definitely have been included in the anthology. Nina's work will be featured, along with that of anthology contributors, in the exhibition "Silent Pictures" at the James Gallery, CUNY.

Saul Bass: The Man with the Golden Arm

Designer Saul Bass's wonderful abstract Film Titles for the movie The Man with the Golden Arm. The film was based on the book by Nelson Algren, still one of the greatest, yet most underappreciated American authors. Abstract Comics avant la lettre?

Abstract 8 series 2 remix

Abstract 8 remix. A friend of mine was really interested to see how the series 2 abstracts would look like with the panels rearranged in a more 'traditional' comics form.

Original below

Abstract 8
Drawingsilence.com

Saul Bass: The Man with the Golden Arm Redux

Following up on Mark's suggestion in the earlier post, here is a "transcription" of Bass's titles into comics form, based on screen caps.



I cheated a bit with panels 13 and 14, because there are only 13 "stable" states in the title sequence, and 13 panels do not fit nicely into a grid. So I assigned the stable states to panels 1-12 and 15, and for 13 and 14 I used "in-betweens. " Still, I think it works nicely. A longer strip could be done using many more of the in-betweens.

Edit: now that I look at it, it kind of reminds me of the I-Ching. Just look at that eighth (and central, though not consciously intended as such) panel.

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We belong to the future!

New review at The Walrus, "Canada's Best Magazine."

The review begins: "Imagine a book publisher had released a retrospective on “The Graphic Novel” in 1976, or that a cinema hosted a look back at France’s nouvelle vague in 1957, or that a gallery exhibit somewhere spotlighted American Abstract Expressionism in, say, 1946. The experience would have been not unlike reading Abstract Comics: The Anthology today." I'm not sure the reviewer means this as 100% a compliment (actually, it's clear he doesn't--not 100%, that is), but I certainly choose to take it as one... Are you kidding? I would have loved to do a survey of Abstract Expressionism in 1946!