1. full page spread. The title reads Get Your (Gra)fixes & (Co)mixes. The perspective is skewed as Tony runs along carrying a stack of books and papers against seemingly endless bookshelves. The text on the lower right read #1 Comics All the Way Down2. This page is divided into three panels, the first one depicts Tony standing in front of a red sphere, this time with only the right side of his body the left is a dark void from which many-tailed dark speech bubbles emanate. The speech bubble reads: Let me introduce myself to you. My name is Tony Patterson I am an artist with a fascination for all things related to comics, graphic novels, and sequential art. The second panel is a close-up of Tony’s face, his right eye nearly bulging out of its socket, his left side a dark void from which the speech bubble tails in the third panel emanate. The third panel contains the red sphere again and the top left word bubble reads: A specific interest of mine is the world of non-fiction comics. I am fascinated with the idea of the comic medium as a tool for academic investigation. The lower right panel reads: The comic medium allows for unique means of expression by enabling the artist to access both written and visual aesthetics. Exploring non-fiction topics through comics would give the scholar multiple modalities to view their research from.3. This page is divided into three panels. A larger one on top with the lower two split diagonally. Starting in the lower right panel a vortex of papers creates a pedestal that breaks through to the upper panel engulfing Tony so only his upper half is visible. His left side is still a dark void from which the many-tailed word bubbles emanate, and his right arm is held out palm upward with a little figure of Scott McCloud as he depicts himself in his comic “Understanding Comics”. The top word bubble reads: But how far can we take this? How deep can we go? What if we used the comic medium to talk about itself? The figure of Scott McCloud says in his own word bubble: An obvious example of this would be Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”. Tony’s next word bubble reads: I think we can take this further though, not just as an explanation of the medium, but as a methodology for talking about other comics as well. The lower two panels contain the red sphere again split between them both but this time it becomes a word balloon that leads back to Tony in the top panel. The text on the left side reads: Academia has long functioned under the opinion that the written word is the most capable medium for explaining the world. I’d like to challenge that assumption and instead — the right side reads: Ask what can be learned by investigating artistic mediums through the mediums themselves.4. This page is split into 4 panels the first depicting an extreme close-up of Tony’s eye, the second an even closer view of the pupil. Reflected in the pupil is a recursive image of a comic page, the very one containing the image of Tony’s eye. the third and fourth panels zoom into the reflection at the third panel of the recursive image, which contains a void depicted by a red-to-white gradient. The top panel reads: So here’s the goal for my project, to talk about comics by drawing comics about other comics. The second panel reads: These reviews will attempt to enlighten aspects of the comics, by emulating and recreating styles and parts of each comic for the purpose of review and critique. The third panel reads: This is the crux of my experiment, if I want to talk about a comic I cannot just write about it I have to draw it. The fourth panel reads: I hope that through this process I may be able to come to insights about the comics that I might not be able to otherwise.5. Full page spread: Tony is shown from the waist up, still only the right side of his body. He stands in front of the red sphere and his right arm is extended forward holding the cover page of this comic warped as the page floats upright in the air. another dark word balloon with many tails emanates from his left side. The text reads: So that’s the rundown. Prepare yourself for more discussions pertaining to the weird and wonderful world of sequential art, I hope you stick around for the ride, it’s gonna be a weird one!Image text: Interested in contributing to this column? Do you have things to say about sequential art? do you lie awake at night formulating dialectic theories on the nature of comics? Contact me at tony@anomalouspress.org
