Abstraction and Comics

This is not a book about abstract comics. Conjunction and in 'Comics and Abstraction' is fundamental. It signals our intention to explore the in-between by combining what from the outset might seem heterogeneous: comics with distinctly different aesthetics, texts using clearly distinct perspectives. The and is a means of meeting and, in this case, it indicates an interaction between comic strip and abstraction such that the two come out mutually refigured. This principle of montage intends to open at the same time the concept of "abstraction" and that of "comic" by loosening the vice of their canonical definitions which, overall, model the abstraction on the non-mimetic (in history of art) or use it to designate a conceptual movement going from the particular to the universal , while the comic strip is generally perceived as a text-image medium of sequential narration. By refracting abstraction through the comic and vice versa, a multiplicity of other terms are thus summoned from such so that the two terms are inflected by additional operating distinctions. Ideally, 'Comic strip and abstraction' seeks to offer a meeting place between learned and popular culture; art history and comic strip research; literature, poetry, drawing and writing; major art and minor art; highbrow, lowbrow, nobrow, etc.