Blaise Larmee
There is a building with paintings on the walls. In these paintings there are other buildings with other walls. These paintings are magical fetishes because we can step through them and walk around and step out of them and look at other paintings. Chris Ware and the grammatists construct buildings in which each wall functions primarily as a unit to be processed instantly. This approach has led to some beautiful buildings, but most of my peers value the paintings themselves, and don't worry if a viewer gets lost in them. For these creators movement is not only inter-panel movement - it exists within the single panel as well.
These single panels offer a different kind of movement. For the creator, these panels offer a malleable liquid space that, over time, becomes more and more crystallized. "Still" in comics is equated with "dead" - and often as a pejorative (dead space, dead time). And yet if we think of static as it exists on television (or in noise music) we find it is like horizontal lines - indicative of stasis as well as movement, but on a scale that defies viewer-object relativity. If everything is moving then everything is still.
Jason Overby overloads his readers with a harsh noise of information that, by entering it, stops being noise. It captures perfectly the mad rush of information that occurs just before sleep. We are moving across this space the way we move through the internet - laterally and instantly through tabs and windows, links and layers. It is a very cerebral kind of movement, in clicks and circuits. Yet it is also very primitive - very primal. On a binary level one can see rhythmic paterns. Time becomes very flat and can be read in drill cores.
Brian Chippendale's comics look similar from afar, but upon entering his noise one finds an extraordinary linear organization. Reading Maggots is like running behind a giant snake that is boring its way underground - seeing all the new tunnels as they're bored out in front of us. It moves so quickly it's actually exhausting and you have to stop and breath every now and then. The beauty of moving so fast through something is that you can return to it later and still see new things.
In Austin English's memory comics the viewer is led through the space the way a child is led by a parent. He takes advantage of our inability to let a narrator stop mid-sentence and puts the text at odds with the visual, making these comics as ephemeral and fleeting as the memories they pertain to. Do these fleeting spaces offer a sense of finality, of having successfully compressed a three minute experience into a single synapse? Can a song be experienced in a moment? Does "real time" find any equivalent in comics? Can stillness exist in comics? Can it exist in real life?
Coming Up: Stasis in Comics
Images: panel from"Two Caves" by Brian Chippendale, page from "Under the Bridge" by JTM, panel from "Sterling Smith, Bruce Wayne" by Jason Overby, Detail from Clean Getaway by Charly Dick-ins, panel from Windy Corner #1 by Austin English
1 comment:
this one was grrr-eat!
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