A 20-page excerpt from Universe A appears to be like within the original arena of the literary journal Shenandoah: https://shenandoahliterary.org/712/universe-a/
I also wrote a lovely lengthy explanatory textual verbalize about it, and about abstract comics customarily, that can also pastime the more theoretically minded readers. It’s linked to from the entrance page of the excerpt. Right here are about a highlights:
Universe A arose out of a prefer to beat what I seen as definitely a few of the boundaries of all abstract comics as much as this point, in conjunction with my hold earlier ones: being pretty quick, they tended to fable one formal tournament, a easy station of changes, one stylish formal arc, then in a well mannered way fetch out of the formulation. I station myself the draw of a two-hundred-page actual abstract fable as a insist, to examine how such formal transformation would be kept going (with any luck in an fascinating formulation) at a necessary higher dimension than heretofore practiced. The foundation, within the event it’s doubtless you’ll perchance, is equivalent to writing a symphony when all the pieces done up to now has been in stylish song invent. Composers had been compelled to make original kinds that will perchance perchance elevate musical vogue over stretches of twenty or thirty minutes rather than three. A true instance of this is the sonata invent, as practiced by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which, simply do, sophisticated issues by contrasting issues, breaking them up, and interweaving them, rather than simply repeating them as soon as or twice then stopping. Since song is continually on my solutions in some invent or one other, it’s doubtless you’ll perchance win within the excerpt here an interweaving of assorted sets of visible shapes—blobs and blots and conduits and more—that is now not so varied from what I staunch described; and indeed song equipped a mannequin for the formulation to development a lengthy abstract visible fable, for which I would possibly well perchance win no other gadgets in other locations.
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An abstract comedian exists as a comedian, as an act of visible narration, handiest within the transition between panels. Therefore, the visible juxtaposition of panels is important to its functioning, and that readerly phenomenon, seen in representational comics, of eclipsing the remaining of the page while focusing on a single panel is now not any longer an option. The abstract comics page kinds a differential visible notion inhabited and structured by variations and deferrals that can handiest be perceived within its gestalt. As the comedian is unable to fall again upon a represented temporality, the implicit directionality of its visible notion is needed to it. Arrayed alongside that directionality, but also modulated by other juxtapositions that transcend easy linear sequencing, the station of panel-to-panel variations constructs the sequential dynamism that scans the page.