Word: comix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the ultra-cool alternate SoHo, makes the perfect location for an "underground" event about "underground" comix. About 150 people from the New York comixcenti gathered last Thursday in a cavernous performance-space-cum-bar near the East River for the second in a series of shows known as "Comics Decode." Taking another step into the realm of comix as performance, "Comics Decode" has comicbook authors read aloud a selection of their work and then take questions about it. Through its early steps "Comics Decode" exposes the challenges of bridging private and public art forms...
...performance space demands a comparable broadening of the audience's experience of the work. Frankly "Comics Decode" hasn't figured out how best to do that yet. Where an author's reading of poetry or prose can shift the emphasis off certain words and onto others, exposing new meanings, comix' visual nature makes this much harder. The performance of comix must turn into more of a show. As a guide the producers and participants of "Comics Decode" should look to Ben Katchor...
...Katchor, author of "Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer," has been at the forefront of adapting comix to performance. His work was turned into short radio plays for National Public Radio and he created an original comix-style opera, "The Carbon Copy Building." But more relevant to "Comics Decode" are his slide shows. Never a straight reading, he frames his presentations in a loose lecture format with titles like, "Halftone Printing in the Yiddish Press and Other Objects of Idol Worship." But the lectures consist of the kind of vaguely-plausible-but-absurd nonsense that make up the majority of Katchor...
...researched, it took five years to complete and totals over 500 pages, including copious footnotes. Moore first gained mainstream media exposure when his "Watchmen" series, about the killings of retired superheroes, established him as a master at orchestrating long-term themes and motifs in the uniquely visual literature of comix. His "From Hell," goes further by turning non-fiction into a singular artistic vision tying together art, history and the supernatural...
...ingenious title of "Hey, Wait?," not only relates to the story but to the act of reading the story. Panels that display a character's quiet moment likewise become our quite moment, for real. Unlike traditional literature, comix, and particularly Jason's simple style, allow the reader to fully move into the space provided. Slowly, but altogether too fast, you look back and see an entire book, and an entire life, has gone past...