DEEP TIME – ABSTRACT COMICS (I)

This post is part of Aarnoud Rommens essay «‘Deep’ Time in Times of Precarity: Experimental Comics as ‘Dark Matter’». In this editing we only publish the section regarding the book Meteorologies, without the notes included in the original text, and it will be presented divided in two parts.

Diniz Conefrey’s Meteorologies is an abstract comic in small format published in 2016, in limited print run, issued by the author’s minor, independent Portuguese publishing house. The comic consists of four stories or episodes, with the titles “Membrana Fóssil” (Fossil Membrane), “Pequenos Mundos” (Small Worlds), “A Matéria do Vento” (Wind Substance), and “Tornado a Casa” (Home Tornado). Though wordless, the comic uses common narrative techniques while evacuating recognisable shapes and figures. Yet, this does not mean that Meteorologies does not tell a story. Like other abstract comics, it can be read as a reflection on the medium itself, as a “formal drama” as Andrei Molotiu puts it in the introduction to the anthology Abstract Comics: “Panel rhythm, page layout, the sequential potential of colour and the panel-to-panel play of abstract shapes have all been exploited to create potent formal dramas and narrative arcs.” This certainly holds for Meteorologies. Furthermore, the comic couples the architecture of panel and page breakdown with distinctive changes in drawing styles to reflect on time and rhythm. The shifting style of the drawings, the panel sequencing, and page layout occasion a reflection on multiple, interwoven temporalities: the duration and varying cadences of reading, the speed, and intensities of drawing, as well as the relation between historical, human-scale time and deep, anti-human, geological time.

Except for the three-panel pages in the opening story “Fossil Membrane,” the individual pages establish a regular two-step beat. In fact, the facing pages are like a large white ground against which four smaller canvasses are placed, thus making the 4-step beat into the ground cadence of the comic. Seemingly ending in a ‘fade-out,’ Meteorologies invites us to read left to right, end to beginning, downside-up, transversally, back to front, and so on, as each image seems to echo the other. The sequentiality typical of alphanumerical decoding — the way one usually reads comics — contends with the modularity of serial recombination occasioned by visual motifs. Meteorologies is expressly presented as a constellation of images.

Throughout the comic there are conspicuous shifts in pacing. At specific intervals, the drawings overflow their grid-cell, expanding and contracting, slowing down and accelerating. Such moments of intensity break up the flow, but calm is eventually restored in a sea of white, the blank page. Meteorologies thus explores the intimacy of reading time whose duration is unpredictable given the resistance abstraction poses to legibility. But it is this resistance that makes the comic so interesting. Its images a kind of Rorschach test, the comic sets loose the demon of visual analogy through its associative potential. Of course, the titles push the associative logic in a certain direction: Meteorologies, “Fossil Membrane,” “Small Worlds,” “Wind Substance,” and “Home Tornado” belong to acertain register that makes the chain of associations less arbitrary. Like words in a poem, they invite the daemon of analogy, leading to infinite visual-verbal associations. Furthermore, this also ensures that the comic is not just a self-reflexive work, a style exercise. It also speaks directly to our historical moment.

The drawings conjure up scientific imagery, intimating a link with — amongst many others — geology, climate maps, microscopy, palaeontology, stratigraphy, sound waves, billowing clouds, blood circulation, seismographic records or even the million years old, inhuman beauty of mineral stones, as explored by Roger Caillois in The Writing of Stones, for instance. The comic appropriates the plethora of today’s “informational images” circulating in mass media, touching on the fields of bio-technology, medicine, astronomy, climate maps and charts indicating climate change, the weather report, and so on. As such, Meteorologies embeds itself in the history of scientific imagery, those images not studied in art history and usually not read in aesthetic terms, but which nonetheless constitute a vast quantity in overall image production. Similarly, Meteorologies inscribes itself in discussions of the Anthropocene, whose visual rhetoric depends on these kinds of images as proof to command belief. The work is radically anti-human: there are no characters, the temporal and spatial coordinates where the ‘story’ unfolds are unfathomable. If Meteorologies is a mapping, it might map on the microscopic as well as the astronomical scale.