Unexpected dental surgery means this blog is going to be a little no-frills.
First up, Kim Jooha is here with an expanded version of her essay exploring an artistic movement she calls French Abstract Formalist Comics.
In the mid-2010s, a group of young French artists began creating wordless comics with geometric and minimalist style and little or no narrative. What they show instead is more of a "process."
The emotionless and mechanical style and lack of narrative and words lead the reader to focus on the formal qualities and abstract concepts of comics, visual art, and printed media, such as space-time, movement, body, sign, texture, representation, transformation, repetition/variation, etc.
I call this new budding movement French Abstract Formalist Comics. They are “Abstract” Formalist comics not because they do not show representational images — they do, and this is a critical difference between them and Abstract Comics — but because they show abstract narrative and study abstract and formalist themes, concepts, and motives.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—The New Yorker excerpts an upcoming book from Olivier Schrauwen.
—Nicole Rudick writes about Julie Doucet for the New York Review of Books. (I lent Nicole a few books to help research this article, and stupidly only now realize that was kind of a self-defeating move for an editor to make. But reading the essay makes it all worth it, even if it was published somewhere else.)
Each issue of Dirty Plotte occupies that peculiar nexus of cringing and giggling. At the moment when a gag comic might end, Doucet pushes further, into uncomfortable territory. The step-by-step instructions in the four-panel “Do It Yourself: Laugh!” conclude not with a lively chuckle but with an unhinged, sputtering roar. But in calling out her fantasies and fears with words and pictures on the page, Doucet uses transgression to carve out a space of power and freedom. She revels in the joy of unfettered exploration, and her enthusiasm buoys otherwise dark subject matter. A trio of strips called “If I Was a Man” begins by conjuring aggressive male sexual behavior (when male Julie muses dumbly on “the great mysteries of nature” after ejaculating on his girlfriend, it’s hard not to read it as a pointed commentary on the outsize male fantasies present in so many comics). But the series ends with idiosyncratic fantasy: the “useful” penis that can store small items like pens and rolled-up magazines and the “romantic” penis that begets flowers.
—Alex Jones and Infowars now (very implausibly, imo) claim that the Pepe the Frog character they appropriated was not the one created by Matt Furie but an obscure Argentine cartoon character named Pepe the Toad that doesn't look very similar...
—The original art for Bernie Krigstein's classic "Master Race" is going up for auction next week.
