Absurd Phones

Absurd Notions has used quite a few different ways of representing the sound of a phone ringing. I went through the archives looking for as many examples as I could find, and arranged them into something resembling a story.

Here it is (warning: requires horizontal scrolling): Absurd Phones

Ben - default - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

Blotcomics

Three wolves named Yves Tanguy, Robert Motherwell, and Fujiwara no Yukinari adopted a wee orphaned child they found abandoned in the wild wearing nothing but a diaper and carrying a stack of funny books under his arm.  The wolves raised him on ink, canvas, Zen aesthetics of chance and own his own funny book collection.  When he came of age, they sent him off into the multifaceted postmodern landscape of blogs, webcomics, emails, wacom tablets and Macintosh computers.

The first work on Blotcomics seems to be a mysterious microscopic world a la Joan Miro or Paul Klee.  Whether or not there is a narrative to this sequence of images probably depends on the disposition of the reader.  It is either a microscopic battle of life and death or simply a camera floating through the world Molotiu has created.  The difficulty of extremely abstract comics is to not have all the panels read as one composition.  I prefer when the panels do not have any continuation of the image preceding them as they read as stand alone panels rather than a single image with a line dividing them.

If you scroll down you will find images from his gallery show.  This gives further insight into his process.  I was especially interested in his "Ghost" images, where Molotiu has drawn, splattered or painted on a page and then taken a computer outline of the hand-drawn image.  It blurs the line between the spontaneity and uniqueness of the hand drawn image and the mass produced illustrated line.I find "Expedition to the Interior" and "Splashes" the most successful and probably the most accessible to the average comic reader.  They are extremely abstract yet still references narrative and landscape.  This perhaps reveals my inclinations towards narrative comics, but these were the ones I connected with the most.  Perhaps I also find them successful because they make best use of positive and negative space.My one overall criticism is the site layout.  This is partially blogger's fault, but the space between the images is just simply too big for most monitors and require the reader/viewer to scroll around unnecessarily to see the whole page.  Perhaps if another, simpler template had been chosen this could be avoided.

I hope to see more from this artist and I am interested to see if he will work more on the Ghost concept in his comic work. 

Grant - default - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

A Sigh of Relief: Superosity

I just finished reading Superosity, Chris Chrosby's comic. A couple notes you might find odd: the ability to read the archives week by week was pretty nice given the style of the strip (not too much scrolling up and down), but the two sets of archives failed to play nice with Piperka, which made it slightly less than totally optimal.

As for notes more about the content, I'll say this: Superosity was fairly regularly making me chuckle on the inside and occaisionally generating "out-loud" style of laughing, or OLSoL as the kids call it on the internet. There is a lot of comic there, and it is thoroughly enjoyable. This is news, I am sure, to approximately no one, as it is a pretty popular comic. If you haven't read it, I recommend giving it a try. It is able to incorporate a stupid character (Chris) without some of the traditional problems of stupid characters, namely, my finding them annoying and stupid.

The title of this post, by the way, is because there was definitely some relief when I finally got to the most recent strip, and no longer felt like I had this obligation to read weeks worth of the strip at a time.

Lewis - default - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶