4CP for President
By:
January 2, 2011
Check out the magnificent December 30th post, at 4CP, about the aesthetic experience of four-color process. Excerpt:
Four-color process and mid-20th century comic art have gone their separate ways – one travelling as a computer-assisted simulation of archaic print culture and the other as computer-assisted art books, featuring crisp black lines, bleed-free white paper, and “reconstructions” of the original colorists’ designs. There are no stakes in privileging one comic book reproduction format over the other, but there is no denying the difference between the two.
Also:
In the mid-20th century comic book, millions of details undermined sequential art time by making readerly time infinitely variable. Details – along with the color process – provided textures, way stations, and destinations for the eye. Choose your own adventure. Find your personal fetishes in the nooks and crannies. Comic book art’s backwater of purely instrumental and often arbitrary visual information was the horizon of meaning, the place where the reading experience became most individual. The tightly controlled wish fulfillment strategies of plot were unhinged by free-floating objects of desire – the details just out of reach, gazing back at us through the electrical field of process printing.
Great stuff. And the two reproductions of a Fantastic Four panel perfectly illustrate Baudrillard’s charming vs. creepy copies thesis.