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2024 - Year in Review
While this year has continued the trend of abandoned projects– Cleft and Slough and Stair– I also feel good about The Third Floor and Mutant Fist. So maybe 2025 will see some completed work to share. But a finished work appeared this year. My short comic “Hands” was published in Shenandoah back in spring. I also finally started Before Comics. I had been thinking about this project for a long…
Before Comics: Egyptian Wrestlers
The ancient Egyptian cemetery Beni Hassan contains thirty-nine tombs built primarily between the 21st to 17th centuries BCE. The fifteenth tomb, built for Baqet III, an official during the 21st century BCE, contains many paintings. Probably the most notable is the one on the eastern wall depicting wrestlers. What is significant about this painting for our purposes is that it shows successive…
The Great Stupa at Amaravati is a Buddhist temple in India built between the third century BCE and 250 CE. The construction time period is s
Before Comics: The Egyptian Book of the Dead
According to what I am seeing in my research so far, narrative art has been widely studied and using it as a search term results in a lot of finds. However, when I separate the specifically sequential from the generally narrative, there is less to be found. Art historians don’t seem to be as obsessed with sequential art as those of us in the comics world are. And there are a lot of non-academic…
Before Comics: The Standard of Ur
Originating around 2,500 BCE, the Standard of Ur is one of the earliest examples of sequential art that we have. While there is earlier art that is definitely narrative, it is not clearly sequential. The Standard of Ur, however, portrays the same characters in different situations and also depicts movement in successive images, and so is clearly sequential. image from Wikipedia The Standard of…
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Before Comics: We've Been Telling Stories with Pictures for a Long Time
In terms of human culture, comics as an art form is relatively new. “The Yellow Kid” started in 1895 and Rodolphe Töpffer first published his work in 1833. So, about 200 years. Yet if we broaden our scope and use the term sequential art, then the time frame opens up dramatically. We leave print behind and start to look at sculpture, weaving, and painting. And this is what I want to do with…
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