This thread is a spinoff from Joe Zabel's thread on the definition of comics. The discussion there touched on whether certain works of fine art are comics. It intrigued me and had me seeing comics everywhere in my art history books. Let me name a few examples, and maybe you comic scholars can debate on whether or not they are comics.

I just read a book on Giotto that featured a series of paintings depicting the story of a honorable saint (sorry, I forgot the details). A story told sequentially through pictures! This was definitely comics! In fact, there are a lot of these 'series paintings' throughout art history that can be interpreted as comics.

I never studied it in great detail, but could Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel be considered a big elaborate comic? The only problem with it is that the panels are out of chronological order, thus making it non-sequential.

McCloud has described comics as a 'temporal map', thus opening up a can of worms on comic possibilities in modern art. Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase' has been passed, since the work depicts motion through space.

Now, maybe I'm getting a little over my head here, but I would like to use this 'temporal map' definition to explore whether cubism is comics. I've recently read a book on cubism where they explain how the artists rendered different perspectives of a figure to be interpreted in different time lines. This was influenced by Einstein's exciting new theories on the space-time continuum. Cubists tried to visualize these theories and ideas through their paintings. Therefore their paintings are 'temporal maps'. Are they comics?

I would like to hear what some of you think about all this! Which of these can be considered comics, if any? Please share other examples of comics in fine art and other areas. This stuff is very fascinating (if only to us comic geeks [img]/resources/ubb/wink.gif[/img] )!

B.C. Bailey
www.huzzy.com





[This message has been edited by bcbailey (edited 04-16-99).]

Is Cubism comics? Hmmm... from your description in ref. to Einstein, it would seem Cubism is a variation on futurism ('course Cubism preceeded futurism, didn't it? But that don't mattrer)

Taking an existing work and trying to decide if it fits in comics is a fascinating exercise. But there's a more practical consideration-- if you have a developing comic story, and you want to decide if a technique like Cubism fits in, and will continue the flow, it might make an important difference.

For instance, some of Mary Fleener's cubistic comics have regular panel continuity, but then she does a splash page which is a cubistic rendering of a variety of events. These splash pages work very well, which would lead me to think that cubism is comics in the most practical sense, that it can be embedded in a comic and contribute to the continuity.

How come this thread is on the online discussion board? Am I losing my mind?

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Joe Zabel

No Joe, I must be losing mine. It was the first thread I started, and I must have posted it here on accident. I'll move this thread to the main Comic Book forum. Disregard this one.

B.C. Bailey