Animation current issue

Editorial

Ndalianis, A., Buchan, S. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

The Frenzy of the Visible in Comic Book Worlds

Ndalianis, A. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

This article argues that the comic book form is anything but static. The panels that litter its pages are riddled with a dynamism and motion that presents its own unique articulation of time and space. Some of the narrative action represented within a comic book panel can ‘freeze’ time, but other panels — while remaining visually static as still images on a page — open up complex depictions of time and space that create modes of perception that are particular to comics. The comic represents the animated flux of time and space through stasis.

The Fastest Man Alive: Stasis and Speed in Contemporary Superhero Comics

Pedler, M. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

In the world of the superhero, action is everything. Focusing on DC Comic’s ‘Fastest Man Alive’, the Flash, this article examines the techniques used by comic book artists to animate the seemingly static images of superhero adventures. Taking its cue from superheroes’ success as the stars of recent action cinema, it takes cinematic theories of action and applies them to the comic page. The frozen poses of superhero splash-pages refute the supposed opposition of narrative and spectacle, while also bestowing perceptual mastery onto the reader. Superhero comics also use their elastic temporality — made possible by the peculiar spatial and temporal aspects of sequential art — for hyperbolic representations of the impossible. The Flash’s heroic feats are rendered through conceptual mechanisms for expressing motion existing within, and between, the panels.

Movements within Movements: Following the Line in Animation and Comic Books

Atkinson, P. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

Animation and comic books share a common field in that both are composed of images sequenced in time: one is driven mechanically and electronically in projection, and the other by the peripatetic and wilful actions of the reader. However, the single comic book panel has its own duration which is co- ordinated both by the exigencies of the narrative and the graphic properties of the two-dimensional pictorial plane. The gestural movement of the artist is implied in each line and it is this movement that presents itself as a ground for understanding movement in both comic books and two-dimensional drawn animation. It is movement that is retained in the animated figure, in the form of the outline, but also runs tangentially in the articulation of both reading movement and artistic gesture.

Derrida, Deleuze and a Duck: The Movement of the Circulating Differential in Comic Book Analysis

Pitkethly, C. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

The search for the ‘secrets between the panels’ in the ‘strange and wonderful’ medium of the comic book certainly evokes the appeal of a narrative adventure — a quest to find a hidden treasure in an unknown realm — but when comic book analysis is consumed by the search to locate a hidden ‘x’ that ‘marks the spot’ of a concealed presence in the medium, does the logocentric form the academic treasure hunt prevent the journey from being anything other than a linear quest progressing towards a concealed presence? In this article, the author applies Deleuze’s extra-structural object = x to the structuring of sense in comic book analysis; she submits this third thing to the ‘irreducible difference’ of Derridean and Deleuzian thought and proposes an alternate reading of the medium, one which attempts to avoid closure through an aporetic reading of the formal structure.

Dryden Goodwin in Conversation with Barnaby Dicker

Goodwins, D., Dicker, B. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

Dryden Goodwin’s frame-based films both challenge and reaffirm the principles and conventions of animation. A fundamental component of his wider artistic project, this form of filmmaking is intertwined with his other concerns, which include drawing, portraiture and notions of ‘series’. In this interview, Barnaby Dicker invites Goodwin to discuss, from a number of perspectives, his approach to frame-based cinematography and how it relates to his work in general. Dicker finds this a rich and important but neglected topic in animation studies; a problem the present interview aims to contribute to correcting. The interviewer is particularly interested in the links between Goodwin’s work and 19th-century chronophotography, which he proposes is more usefully applicable here as photochronography — Etienne-Jules Marey’s original term for the process. A further link is drawn between the ‘documentary’ aspects of Goodwin’s art and Jean-Louis Comolli’s theory of direct cinema. Although the two would seem to be poles apart, the interviewer finds a number of Comolli’s remarks exemplified through Goodwin’s approach. Other themes running through the interview include the role of film within gallery and installation contexts and the relationships between classical and contemporary art practices and technologies.

Reviews: Barbara Fluckiger, Visual Effects: Filmbilder aus dem Computer (German language). Marburg: Schuren Verlag, 2008. 528 pp., 399 illus. (mainly colour) ISBN 978--3--89472--518--1 (pbk)

Goldberg, M. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST

Review: Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950--1980. London: Quiller Press, 2008. 250 pp. ISBN 1899163891

Lambert, N. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:45:47 PST