The Ephemerist

Never Been, a nine meter long wordless narrative scroll by Stuart Kolakovic, is now completely available online ! It’s a magnificent tale of loss and regret, beautifully rendered in Kolakovic’s trademark style, combining contemporary cartoon elements and references to traditional art from Eastern Europe.

What’s particularly interesting about this piece, is that it’s essentially one big drawing, in which the different frames that make up the narrative, are flawlessly meshed. Important turns in the story are accentuated by changing the visual direction of the art as well (reminiscent of Scott McCloud’s infinite canvas - Mr. McCloud’s influence is spreading, it would seem). In short, a beautiful piece, that I would very much like to own in hardcopy. Stuart, you know what to do !

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Washingtonpost.com reports on the works of painter Deena Feigelson Margolis, whose work is on display at the McLean Project for the Arts in Washington.  Called “Four months”, it’s the result of her attempt to make a painting a day for four months, after reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.  Margolis was especially intrigued by McCloud’s discussion of “the relationship of the frame to the spaces between the frames”.

Similarly, since it turned out to be impossible to actually create a pictue every day, there are sporadic gaps in the finished series, representing Margolis most eventful and hectic days.  Paradoxically, they are the elements in the chain that tie the narrative together, and are in a way her best paintings.

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Neil Gaiman preaching, and Scott McCloud lecturing. Sights for sore eyes…

(from the Politics and Prose Bookstore Flickr Page)

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This has probably been blogged to death by now, but I like the gesture so much, that I just couldn’t stop myself promoting it.

Scott McCloud, comics’ homo universalis par excellence, has decided to make his online comic, The Right Number, available free of charge. Before, you had to pay what McCloud insists on calling a micropayment for the right to read it, but now it’s there in all its glory.

It’s an intriguing story about a young man becoming obsessed with the idea that there is a pattern behind the girls he’s known in his life and their telephone numbers, and that somewhere there’s a girl with the perfect number, who would be perfect for him. The story is particularly engaging, though, because McCloud has decided not to put the panels one next to the other, but to embed them in each other, continuously drawing the reader further into the story, and into the main character’s obsession.

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It’s probably been around forever, but I only came across it today while researching a different article : Chapter 5 1/2 of Scott McCloud’s monumental Making Comics. It’s a quite interesting piece, in which McCloud elaborates on his infinite canvas ideas from a reader’s perspective.

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