Category Archives: The Purist

A series of experiments in form, process, and thinking outside the box.

Here’s a thought about medieval comics

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[The] unconventional aspects are deliberate pointers to a hidden poetic structure, accessible only to the initiate. This deep structure is a system of interrelated parts conveying a unity of meaning. Although the links uniting these parts exist on the visual level, they are predominantly a function of subtextual narratives and symbols operating below the surface and realized in the educated viewer’s mind. The iconographer relies on the viewer’s silent co-participation in his creative process to uncover a mystery beyond words.

I had you convinced for a second that this was about some experimental comics, didn’t I? This is actually from the abstract for a study of a 500 years old, Russian icon depicting the biblical “last judgment”.

Let this be a lesson that a) I interpret everything as pertaining to comics, and b) everything pertains to comics.

JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES

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A draft version of my editorial for next volume of C’est Bon Anthology, “Motion Picture”:

You know the guy. If you have ever in any social context tried discussing comics on more than a “Lil’ Abner was a durn good strip” level, chances are he was in the crowd. He’s a pretty nondescript guy, could be anybody really, but you’ll recognise him when he chips in and goes “Yeah, comics and movies are similar in a lot of ways.” And then the conversation takes a turn towards film, and it turns out he’s in cinema studies and really needs the attention. And sometimes he’s a woman. Look, I just made him up to prove a point, okay?

And there’s really no connection between comics and film, either. For one thing, comics don’t necessarily move (although some webcomics do); for another, movies very rarely work with plastic framing (since the silver screen doesn’t change its shape). Certain compositional analyses apply to both media, simply because they are both related to art theory, in which the analyses originate.

Film is the vision of a director (and a producer, and a board of CEO’s, and their daughter, and the pony she rode in on) filtered through a cameraman, a cast of actors, a sound designer, an editor, and, ultimately, a projector. Comics are the vision of a cartoonist, filtered through anything that might leave a mark on paper; the cartoonist sends her work to C’est Bon Anthology, you read it, end of line.

But there’s more: Comics are sequences of images composed and arranged to convey the passing of time graphically, and/or by juxtaposition transcend the meaning of the individual images. Which is quite exactly what the sequential images of a filmstrip can’t do without the projector, and, incidentally, in experiencing the time and space of the movie, we cease to perceive the sequence of the displayed images.

But the notion that film and comics are related on a deeper level is popular, and hard to lay to rest, much like Justin Bieber. What better way, I ask you, than to orchestrate an anthology of comics set to the tune of (no, wait, that’s our next volume!) – to the theme of Motion Picture? Read on, but be aware that we might be spoiling movies for you altogether!

The Purist 2, stage 5

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The fifth and last stage (so far) of The Purist 2, in which I try to combine the results of stages 2 and 3: As I said in the write-up for Stage 2, I weren’t at all happy with the results when I finished it. Even so, after some more successful experiments in stages 3 and 4, I needed more material to work with to contort and stimulate what I already had.

Once again, like in Stage 4, I wound up taking two different stabs at the task. The first part simply takes the hexagons from Stage 2 and subdivides them using fragments of shapes from Stage 3; the other half integrates the two stages’ end results better, and feels more like a true combination.

Download the PDF here: PURIST-2_5-Combine, and if you haven’t already, go read stages 1, 2, 3, and 4

A note of clarification: I’m not just naming this experiment The Purist 2 to be mysterious—there is a Purist 1, it just hasn’t finished gestating in my mind. It is even more basic than this piece, perhaps even to the point of being insulting to the reader.

I do not know if it makes sense, if the concepts are even original, or if anybody would gain anything from reading it… If there turns out to be sufficient interest in The Purist 2, I will go on to make the prequel :)

The Purist 2, stage 4

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This is the fourth part of The Purist 2, in which I intervene the process with 1½ attempts at the subdivided grids from stage 3—as you’ll see, this falls in two parts of  ”intervention”, as I got a bit over-enthusiastic with the first one, that became almost architectural.

The second attempt is more workable in a comic layout context, but may not be as interesting in terms of experimentation. I can only hope the whole sits somewhere in between. The systematical approach to the progressive stages of developing and exploring this self-imposed grid worked better and better for me, however.

Downloadable PDF: PURIST-2_4-Intervene

The previous three stages have been published as individual PDFs here, here, and here.

The Purist 2, stage 3

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This is the third post in my Purist 2 series, a “progress comic” exploring new ways to put lines on paper. Well, technically it’s rather traditional in that it’s all mechanical pencil on low-pulp paper, but I wanted to think a bit out of the box and not just have right-angle and parallel lines for a starting point. I also tried to not think vey much at all besides.

I soured on the results of Stage 2, so I regressed to the results of the first, constructive stage. Picking the major lines I wanted to stick with for the grid, I then decided to do subdivisions of the larger areas formed by those lines. After all, this will in time be the template for comic pages, and partitioning will come in handy.

Apart from that pragmatic reasoning (which might really be rationalising), this crystallised Stage 1 for me, and I like the results very much. I wanted asymmetry, well I got it; the final results in this stage almost look non-euclidian (in the lovecraftian sense).

PURIST-2_3-Subdivide is a PDF freely available for download until I decide differently. You can find Stage 1—Construct here, and Stage 2—Mutate here. Stage 4 is published tomorrow, and Stage 5 the day after that.

The Purist 2, stage 2

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This is stage 2 of my process comic The Purist 2. You can read more about stage 1 here. Basically, it’s a line-by-line documentation of me developing a grid to use for laying out a new comic I’m working on. Initially though, I tried to clear my mind of any purpose and just see what would come up.

With this stage I decided (a bit prematurely) to force a shape dogma on the grid. For various reasons I thought it would be a great idea to work hexagons into it, for effect or for concept/story purposes, so for a couple of hours I laboured on finding and isolating honeycombs in the mesh of lines that came of stage 1.

Eventually, I manipulated the shapes out of the raw material but not to a result that I cared for at all. Too much of the spontaneity was lost, and I found that I had tried to intellectualise the thing way too much, at least at this early stage. Nevertheless, or for that very reason, this second stage is included in the Purist 2 series, as a slap on my wrist to not let my cleverness run off with me :)

So, for your downloading pleasure: PURIST-2_2-Mutate (PDF) — part two in a series of five, next one up tomorrow!

The Purist 2, stage 1

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This is something I tweeted about some time ago, a little experiment in process documentation. There are a couple of thoughts that went into this:

1) The desire to go into the act of work and lay it bare without any filter/self-censorship; 2) the fact that I wanted to have a non-rectangular, asymmetrical grid to base the layouts of my next comic, and 3) to publish something that would be a meditation of form, without any content whatsoever.

So this is what I came up with. During one day I went through five phases of work process, making a scan of the page for every line drawn. My goal with the first phase was to lay out a set of lines that would form the basis for the next stages, trying to work as randomly as possible, only avoiding lines parallel to the paper edge, and lines intersecting at 90° angles.

This is a documentation, or process comic, of that first stage. Feel free to scoff at it for being self-indulgent, pretentious, or unrewardingly dense. It’s all that, I guess. It’s also something I needed to do to get a crack on the layouts for that comic, I just happened to add the documentation layer to it. Read at your own discretion.

So until further notice, here is PURIST-2_1-Construct. The next four stages will be published as separate PDFs in the days to come!