4CP Friday

By: Matthew Battles
May 13, 2011

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of 4CP, HiLobrow invited guest curators to assemble themed comic-book-detail galleries from 4CP’s collection. Click here to see all galleries.

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THEME: SHADOW
CURATOR: MATTHEW BATTLES

I’m drawn to those panels where the matrix of Benday dots gives way to swathes of solid black. The comics artists, like Caravaggio, know the indispensible luxuries of shadow: how it frames the light, points up drama, lends volume to a scene. But to a greater degree than the chiarascuro of old, maybe, these planes of process black mount a curious existential query: an insistence that there is something at work in all that nothingness.

5GiantDrac3LurkingMan.jpg.scaled.550 — Click on image for larger version

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ElevatorManCrop.jpg.scaled.550 — Click on image for larger version

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CrowdGSizeChillers1 — Click on image for larger version

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CactusSmaller.jpg.scaled.550 — Click on image for larger text

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SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: CHESS MATCH — a gallery | FILE X — a gallery | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM — 25 Jack Kirby panels | SECRET PANEL —Silver Age comics’ double entendres | SKRULLICISM | CURATED: 4CP FTW by John Hilgart | ANNOTATED GIF by Kerry Callen | FANCHILD by Adam McGovern

Categories

Comics, Spectacles

Tags

4CP, 4CP-Friday, comics

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.