Category: art

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The University of British Columbia has placed online Oliver Byrne’s rendition of Euclid’s geometry. Very cool. Edward Tufte highlighted it in one of his recent books that I read. I can’t remember if it was Beautiful Evidence or Envisioning Information. In sum…

An unusual and attractive edition of Euclid was published in 1847 in England, edited by an otherwise unknown mathematician named Oliver Byrne. It covers the first 6 books of Euclid, which range through most of elementary plane geometry and the theory of proportions. What distinguishes Byrne’s edition is that he attempts to present Euclid’s proofs in terms of pictures, using as little text – and in particular as few labels – as possible. What makes the book especially striking is his use of colour.

It’s quite beautiful for a textbook.

Ghost World (review: 3/5)

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I wonder what if there is a world that equates to a small-town version of a pastorale? Suburbanale? Anyway, in Ghost World Daniel Clowes presents a few days in the life of two teenage girls as they piss away a small-town summer. The first time I tried to read this, I was bored to tears. Really, nothing happens. On second read, what actually impresses is the way Clowes can craft those micro-moments and give a full characterization with minimal material. This parallels the restrained artwork, using only black, white, and a pale blue for all the panels. The dialogue is shockingly foul and absolutely hilarious at times. High drama it is not, but there are worse ways to kill an hour. Keep an eye out for Enid’s shifting hairstyles.

In the Shadow of No Towers (review 2.5/5)

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I can’t remember the last time I read a book less than 50 pages–In the Shadow of No Towers weighs in at 42 huge, colorful spreads. Art Spiegelman’s recent book brings together a collection of broadsheets illustrated in the years following 9/11, and also shares the notable cover from the September 23, 2001 issue of the New Yorker. It feels like Woody Allen meets Charles Schulz, a jittery sort of memoir on the nature of terror and the stress of memory. There’s a recurring motif of the towers’ metal structure glowing red, just before their collapse. So there’s this palpable sense of anticipation that to some degree lasts even today, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. The work is bookended with a couple essays on his relationship with cartooning and politics.
Bonus material: Spiegelman has a nice dialogue with NPR about 9/11 and cartooning.

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Henry Darger is one of the more notable creators of outsider art. When living in Chicago as an adult, Darger went to church every day, worked as a janitor, and generally kept to himself. On the side, he wrote a 15,143-page illustrated fantasy, The Story of the Vivian Girls, which wasn’t discovered until after his death. It’s just fascinating on so many levels.
Here a longer profile of Darger at Salon, and a nice little essay with links to a great collection of the artwork and other resources. Last year, PBS featured a documentary and a tour of his work. And don’t forget to stop by and see the Flickr photos tagged with “Darger”.

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Lost America features “night photography of the abandoned roadside west.” Troy Paiva uses really long exposures so he can do “light painting” to customize all the atmospheric colors.

Reinventing Comics (review: 3/5)

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Reinventing Comics is the middle child in the McCloud comics trilogy. I found it to be the weakest and least interesting of the three. (see my reviews of Making Comics and Understanding Comics) Not bad, but nothing special. McCloud himself sums up nicely:

I believe that Reinventing Comics has genuine flaws. The two halves don’t always work well together, the storytelling is frequently stiffer and less convincing, and my enthusiastic advocacy of online comics is rarely tempered by some of the bleaker, more pessimistic scenarios offered by other writers in recent years. It was a harder book to write than Understanding Comics and, from all reports, a harder book to read.

Reinventing Comics came about in the midst of the dot-com boom, and you can see the e-nthusiasm popping out every which way in this book. The book discusses the 12 “revolutions” that comics will have to go through to achieve maturity and (ideally) financial stability. One really cool thing is that McCloud seems to anticipate the arrival of Long Tail economics, with the web giving comics the ability to penetrate down to ever smaller niches.

I have to absolutely agree with McCloud’s idea that “the digital delivery of comics has the potential to revolutionize the industry, and that the aesthetic opportunities of digital comics are enormous.” Unfortunately, I think RC shortchanges itself. It’s this business bias that caught me off-guard–RC is very much focused on the structure of the industry, rather than the art it delivers. That’s a shame, because it’s always been McCloud’s thoughts on comics theory that caught my attention. And there are certainly more prescient business writers out there.

Perhaps his surface treatment of the artistic potential of web comics is a side effect of the medium. That is, it can be really difficult to talk about webspace ideas on the zero-interaction surface of a sheet of paper. I’d like to hear his thoughts on the aesthetics of digital delivery now that the technology has matured a bit, and after he’s had more time to experiment.

Making Comics (review: 4.5/5)

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Scott McCloud’s latest is all about story-telling secrets and how to shape your own vision for comics. It mimics the style of his earlier book, Understanding Comics, using the form to explain itself, and expands a bit more on the theories he presented there.
I think it’s wonderful to see how much more mature McCloud’s own work is in this book. The art is better; the layouts are cleaner and more interesting. The visuals are all just more inventive and lively. I was glad that McCloud seemed to stretch himself and take the opportunity to demonstrate his competence by illustrating in a lot of different styles–you can tell that he really put a lot of work into these panels. All that effort pays off, especially in the chapters devoted to backgrounds and to facial expressions.

One of my complaints about UC was that he didn’t give enough examples–but Making Comics absolutely makes up for that. To boot, there’s an excellent bibliography, and every chapter has some supplementary wrap-up content. Each chapter ends with a couple pages of footnotes, commentary, and also exercises to help you flex your comics skillz. Very impressive, and a lot of fun to read.