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CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeAug 1st 2009 edited
The following is copyright 1999 Paul Pope. Found it on an old site. Don't ask me where numbers 1 and 2 are. -- W
THE DESIGN BEHIND THB, PAUL POPE AND THE DESIGN CONTAINER OF COMICS
3. THB AS A DESIGNER LABEL
So THB is an ongoing comics series, as well as a loose grouping of splinter projects revolving around a "THB Universe" of stories, symbols, and characters. At the same time, THB is also a sort of designer label, like Fuct of Astralwerks, representing a product line, a style, and an ethos. THB is my reflection in comics.
4. TSCHICHOLD'S LAW
"Communication must appear in its briefest, simplest, and most urgent form." - Jan Tschichold, 1925
5. GRAPHIC SIMPLICITY
The influence of Japanese graphic designer Tadanoori Yokoo is evident in this drawing dated 10.31.96. Yokoo, and another contemporary Japanese artist, Masami Teraoka, have been instrumental to the new direction in which THB is moving.
One of my favorite graphic designs is Warhol's Rolling Stones "Tongue", done for the '71 album, Sticky Fingers. It's amazing such a simple, iconic image can say so much with so little. There is a graphic intensity inherent to comics and manga, a seductive, direct, non-verbal expressiveness possible, when we combine a few words with a series of simple pictures.
Graphic simplicity is one of our medium's strongest facets. The simpler, the better.
6. POP
I used to want to deny coimcs' link to Pop Art, particularly out of a misunderstanding of artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein, who continually used comics imagery in their work. Now I believe we must embrace and assimilate Pop as our direct graphic tradition if we are going to surpass it within our own medium. Pop stoles comics. We need to steal it back, along with the crown Pop gave itself.
7. LEGIBILITY
The designer has no special social considerations. But I believe a designer ought to have one special aesthetic consideration: He ought to strive to create legibility when giving form to ideas. A designer must be conscious of his design decisions. Even the choice to leave in a good accident is a conscious decision. Let the form be the one which best frames or clothes the idea.
Print design, whether for books, magazines, posters, or comics, serves a conventional purpose: It is intended to communicate ideas first, and perhaps to exhibit style second. Alphabets are no less conventional in this sense, and design is like a highly complex, personal graphic language. Design is a tool of communication, with specific, if open-ended, functions. We don't need to create new design theories for their own sake, especially if the old ones work perfectly well. We don't need to break something just to fix it. Our focus ought to be self-expression. The one exception is when the breaking the rules is itself the self-expression.
It seems to me the strongest argument for comics is that it has a direct link to the earliest stick figure pictograms of the ancient caves of Lascaux. Drawing is ancient. People have been telling stories with pictures for as long as they could think of things which need more than words to say.
8. DESIGN CONTAINERS
There is the artform of comics, there is graphic design, there is drawing, and there is the economy of packaging ideas as products. Inspired primarily by Yokoo, and fellow artist-designer Teruhisa Tajima, I've begun to think about presenting comics as part of larger print tableaus which I'm calling "Design Briefings" or "Design Containers." I think of these as the non-linear atmospheres in which ideas float. A comics story is a narrative told in the comics medium, but a "comic" is more than that. It is an idea vehicle, a reading machine, a design container, and an art artifact. I'm approaching THB as a kind of "down loading," the purpose of which is not necessarily to tell a direct story, but rather to persuade one to the ideas of the art itself, to suggest a mood, to uncover a state of mind, to evoke a sense of the time and place in which the stories were created. To create a world. A design container is a kind of time capsule, a graphic broadcast, a signature.
9. A PROVISION
The answer to the question, "What is comics?" can never fully be answered, or answered in some way which will inhibit future cartoonists. I reject that notion of Post-Modernism which asserts that all art possibilities have been discovered, leaving us merely the freedom to recombine pre-existing elements borrowed from different sources. I find that notion truncating and jealous, and simply wrong. There are as many new art solutions as there are artists to attempt new art problems. We don't fully know what is comics, only what it has been, and what it could be. This provision is true for all the arts. All art media must have a starting point here on earth, but an end point stretching some where into infinity. -
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CommentAuthorhelloMuller
- CommentTimeAug 3rd 2009
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Goddamn I love Paul Pope. Comic artist/creator as rockstar. Comic as concept album. Death to the nerd.
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Death to the nerd indeed!
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CommentAuthorfrequentcontributor
- CommentTimeAug 10th 2009
Interesting. Why doesn't Paul Pope have a comics critique column somewhere? In a related note: Bust Magazine's latest issue had a brief one-page "feature" on Pope, but printed the text over a fucking photo of him! I was like, show us some of his art, assholes! It is slightly difficult to communicate the power of his lines without actually showing them; a huge disservice to the other Bust readers out there (who don't know Pope's work...). -
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His last art book had a ton of notes about different subjects like this. I read them anytime I get stuck, this guy is definitely one of our generation's best
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@gzapata
Its a shot in the arm, isn't it? Evertime I come back to it, I'm reminded that to be an artist, i must WORK on my art. Its such a simple conclusion but I forget it every once in a while. -
Very true the page I go back to the most is the anatomic quatro- axiomatic- manifesto
1- "comics" is a visual language. It is a stroytelling form
2- "comics' inhabit a place between the nuance of words and the suggestion of images
3- the art of good comics is doing with words and pictures exactly what you think you're doing
4- the comic not yet drawn can hold the forms of the greatest ideas an artist can have.
I wish I could show the page with the quotes though -
- CommentAuthorDrinkwater
- CommentTimeAug 16th 2009
As a prospective high school teacher, I know that I'm more bombarded with the question "What's the point of this stuff?"
When my words fail, I fully intend to read the following bit of wisdom from page eighteen of Pulphope:
"When I need my own mirror of men and angels, I too turn to hear the voices of the dead. Without even having faith in mystics, I too turn to take my cue from dead mystics. When I need voices, I turn to Emerson and Thoreau. Their Transcendentalism rings a bit hollow to me (I am no Platonist), but their words still ring clear and true. I turn to the dour civics of Confucius and the clear-eyed cynicism of Machiavelli. The life-embrace of Epicurus. I turn to the dreamtime of Jung and the pastorality of Tolkein. And to others. These poets and philosophers are the whispering dead I hear, pointing the way to the road which leads out of this inferno. These are the dead on the roof with me, these are my Virgils. They point their parchment fingers toward the arc of the heavens, helping make sense of a meaningless rising moon and a mute and dumb setting sun."
Any student of mine who is not moved by that passage will forced to do a book-report of Heavy Liquid.
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