Assuming the internet hasn't been wasted out to sea today we have our latest Building Stories essay. Jacob Brogan writes about the role of memory in the narrative.
But if Building Stories calls paradoxical attention to necessary acts of amnesia, it also celebrates the awkward art of remembering, reveling in the way fragments of recollection constantly shape and reshape us. Ware organizes many of the book’s most formally compelling spreads around particular images, images that his individual panels circle like spokes on a wheel. These organizing emblems seem to be nothing so much as occasions for memory, sites around which otherwise distinct reflections cohere. Ordinarily, one strives to connect the diverse panels that make up a comics page by working through their temporal relationships to one another. By contrast, Building Stories often forces us to instead consider the thematic relations between the various sequences that make up each of these spreads, as well as their mutual bond to the central image that holds them together.
Elsewhere!
-Gee, I wish David Lasky would prepare New York like this.
-Joe Simon's collection is being auctioned off at Heritage. The artist certainly had some wonderful stuff. Here's a link to his own and Simon & Kirby studio work, but deeper searching reveals some gems from Jack Davis, Boody Rogers and others. I could look at those Boys' Ranch pages pretty much forever. Here's a bit more from the Simon archives. I'm always fascinated by what emerges from archives -- the things that were buried (I mean, a Boody Rogers page?), then things that must have been valued, etc. It provides a random, disjunctive snapshot of an artist's (mostly unconscious) sensibility.
-Speaking of sensibility...In the 1980s all teenage suburban comic fans aspired to this.
And two from the Times... artist Fiona Staples talks about the ongoing series Saga, and comics-inflected artist Trenton Doyle Hancock opens a show this week.
