I saw Moon Monday night.
It was really refreshing. The last hard sci fi movie that I remember seeing was Sunshine, and that kind of fell apart at the end. Moon, directed by Duncan Jones, definitely follows the tradition established by 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, while also managing to throw in some humanizing bits of humor.
There’s a great post by Ken Parille over at Blog Flume on “Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction.” Here’s a snippet:
[In this panel, there’s] a giant ‘paint splat’ surrounded by a fuzzy ‘lightning bolt’:
Even though a cartoon ‘paint splat’ has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown – it’s just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.
It’s fascinating to me that images in comics can have specific grammatical functions, can be a subject or a verb. It’s definitely something very unique to the medium of comics, and something that I see exploited way more in older newspaper strips than in contemporary comics, which is a shame. When cartoonists play around with visual symbols in this way, reality beings to melt and lose its concrete nature. It becomes “a set of symbols to be manipulated abstractly” as the co-mix blog puts so succinctly.
Update December 21st, 2017: The post from which I pulled the quote in the previous paragraph, and the whole co-mix blog, has been deleted.
In alphabetical order:
We would find any location with a working electrical outlet and set up late-night, poorly organized, anything-goes shows—parking garages, Laundromats, the UT art building. We were really inspired by that famous show with J Church on the Lamar Pedestrian Bridge. Most of the recordings were made in really limited-edition mix-tapes for friends and such, so most of that stuff is out of print. I have a huge amount of unmarked CD-Rs from these kids, super scuffed-up and all. One of them came with a few shards of broken glass.
via malcolm elijah’s flickr.
Paper Rad isn’t a sexy story either. I’d like to be able to talk about it like a young New Yorker might talk about dance parties or graphitti or doing drugs, but when you ask me about Paper Rad I am going to have to tell you about how it was and is just a desperate vital exercise in finding meaning in life.
CO-MIX BLAWG by JASON OVERBY and BLAISE LARMEE (hilariously URL’d COMETS COMETS)
Performance is perhaps the most overlooked element in comics criticism today. It is the boogie man among indie creators who seek “unmediated expression” and it is indistinguishable from nonperformance in super-mainstream comics. In fact it is difficult to say there exists a nonperformative space in comics at all, since the entire reality of comics exists only in the mind of the reader and the creator.
AND
Comics is a reductive medium. Visual forms are presented in the service of an idea and are simplified so that they may convey information clearly and concisely. The cartoon is a type of signifier that can be used to play mathematical games.
BRILLIANT
thnx sam
I just got The Moth or the Flame by Joshua Ray and Follow Me by Jesse Moynihan in the mail yesterday.
I started reading Follow Me last nite and its dope! Then I went to Jesse Moynihan’s website and lo and behold, it turns out he makes a totally crazy full-color webcomic about our Atlantean past. It’s called Forming, here’s a quote from the summary:
Central golden boy Mithras, lands in Atlantis around 10,000 B.C. Within a hundred years he has transformed the Atlantean population into a slave force to mine Earth’s precious minerals. He has children with human labor captain Gaia because the freaky star-shaped birthmark on her face is a sign of the elements. Their offspring are gifted with awesome abilities but the children, in general, creep Mithras out.
One such child, Arges, stumbles across the head of a dead dog in the forest. The head is possessed by a channeling entity. He warns, “You can no longer trust your father.”
“That’s what my sister said.” Arges replies.In Canaan another alien, Serapis the Androgyne, arrives with a group of creatures cloned from his DNA, The Nephalim Guard. They encounter Adam & Eve and begin a period of observation and stealth known as OPERATION: HEAVENLY SWORD.
Also be sure to check out Frank Santoro’s notes on Mat Brinkman’s MULTIFORCE, here’s a great quote from the end:
The pieces of the multifaceted storyline grow together and create a life of their own. The web that’s fastened is a solid structure, a jewel that reflects each point of the story as it turns. Like some galaxy contained in an aquarium, Multiforce vibrates beyond the comic book page. Mat Brinkman may be the spiral architect of this generation of cartoonists.
via big picture.
Over my weekend trip to Hensylvania (my first ever visit to the Hensel Hill Farm, which has been run by Hensels for six generations, since my great-great-great-grandfather bought the farm in 1820 for $4,000 and a bottle of whiskey!), I pretty much finished the DS remake of Chrono Trigger, which I first played when I came out in 1995, and when I found this image I realized it would be the perfect way to commemorate both events …
Also, playing through Chrono Trigger really got me itching to design a video game … anyway want to collab on Hyperbox: the Videogame?
I just finished my submission to TAFFY HIPS #3.5!
Here’s a preview:
Its a gridded drawing that explores some of the ideas that I put into SHAMANMAN for SMOKE SIGNAL …
A collection of Providence comics from the past 15 years, assembled from the archives of The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. From Greg Cook, more images from the comics at his original post.
Froghead Hangover got reviewed over at Optical Sloth, here’s a quote:
I’ll just say that any ambivalence I had about the last issue is gone with this one, as this is a pile of fun. Those frog eyes will haunt you if you’re not careful, if you read this you’ll see what I mean.
The review is on the same page as the review for TRANZ, so if you scroll down you can check that out too.
