Tomorrow sees the seven year graphic novel project by Isabel Rucker, Unfurled, revealed as it goes on display in San Francisco. The title is well chosen as Unfurled eschews the normal comics formats and indeed even pages for a comic tale drawn upon a 400 foot, 12 inch wide roll. From the description on the site:
“The seven-year project began in 2002 when Isabel found a roll of calculator paper and thought about drawing a very long comic on it. She decided to upsize to larger rolls. She likes to be un-bound by the size of a regular piece of paper, canvas or sketchpad.
Isabel plays with word placement and twists around visual perspectives in “Unfurling.” The panels’ sizes produce experiments in the constant change of a bird’s eye view or taking a wandering thought literally and drawing an extra long panel. For example, a portion of a West Coast road trip is over ten feet long starting in the Pacific Northwest and ending in San Francisco. And when Isabel is snowed in the mountains of the Wyoming Rocky Mountains, there is a big panel of snowflakes to illustrate the quiet pass of time. Or sometimes there are series of short panels to reflect a quick group of thoughts.”
(a segment from “Cesar Chavez Street in San Francisco” from Unfurling by and (c) Isabel Rucker, click the link to scroll along more of this scene; for some reason scrolling along this I was reminded – in a good way – of Oli East’s work)
I have heard of artists working in long swathes of rolls before, although I’m not sure they’ve been so long; it would, I imagine, offer different methods from the more usual comics form (in some ways I’d imagine its almost like a non-animated cartoon where the viewer moves along the roll rather than having images flickered before their eyes) but I’d suspect it must also offer up some serious challenges to the artist – bad enough when you make a mistake on a panel or page that you can’t re-work, but what if you do it halfway through a massive, continual roll? The long period of gestation for the project is also interesting – obviously diary-type comics work are not new, but this ‘rolling’ format would be quite an interesting way to experience the passage of the artist’s timeline, I think. Of course it doesn’t lend itself easily to mass printing for a wider audience to actually take home and read, unless it were to be done in the old scroll form that dominated the written word before books became the main format of choice.
Unfurling will go on show in the SoMarts Gallery in San Francisco on November the 5th and runs through to the 27th and the exhibition also includes new pencil work from Mark Bode from the historical graphic novel Cobalt 60 and Mike Dingle’s I See the Future, all works exploring the ideas of travel and exploration, real and imaginary; check the site for details. (link via BoingBoing)
November 4th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Nice idea!
Made me think of Japanese artists from the 15th century using this format and I checked Wikipedia, so here’s one that was famous for it:
Sesshū Tōyō and his “Long Scroll of Landscapes” – more infos here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.....%8Dy%C5%8D