Here's another installment of my weekly sequencing column, this time on what I think just might be my favorite Moebius page of all time, out of his rarely-seen, even-more-rarely-talked about book Upon A Star. Maybe I will have to review that one; heaven knows the story is more sizzle than steak (it is a Moebius comic, after all), but panel by panel it's just so interesting: he strips out all his usual detail and does kind of a Herge, ligne claire, pure-cartooning thing on it. Upon A Star is the book that made me realize I didn't love Moebius's work for the detail or even the design, but the simplicity and uniqueness of his forms -- like, even when he draws the most intricate hunk of machinery you've ever seen, usually it's a very simple shape, an oval or a bar or something. It's those shapes that have the real power, much more than the high-focus detailing does, and they're all over this page here. Moebius is one of the few artists whose abstract drawings I find as interesting as the figurative ones (Jack Kirby, Gary Panter, CF are the others who immediately spring to mind) -- I think probably because he has such a developed, individual style. When the way somebody draws something is as big a part of the attraction as what they're drawing, it can be fun to look at completely content-free examples of their work, just shape and line and form and color like this page is.
That's the reason I was so attracted to this Kirby panel, which I wrote about here. It's Kirby completely unrestrained, his signature visual device, "Kirby krackle" swarming over the panel, barely making any concession to what it's supposed to be depicting.
Panter's abstract pages are the same way -- he's just focusing on those lines and shapes, not really worrying about how to work them into the context of some story or other. Putting that power on the page and devoting everything to it, not putting any contrived narrative or explanation in its way. This page is from a story you can read here.
CF will do breaks of abstraction in a lot of his comics -- there's usually an overarching narrative (or at least a conceptual focus of some kind), but then everything except the visual will disappear for parts, and you're just contemplating these images, letting them take your brain wherever they will and influence your experience of the story that way rather than the more usual way of the pictures "telling you stuff". I talked a little bit more about CF's approach to abstraction here.
Anyway, cool Moebius page, and I write about it in much greater depth at Robot 6. Go read!
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