UNCOMICS Anthology (CBA vol 56|57)

A hefty, lavishly printed softcover volume—180 large-format, full-color pages—featuring seventeen practitioners of "Uncomics," working in the US, the UK, Sweden, Finland, and Japan.

"Uncomics" asks us to imagine a radical rethinking of the formal components of comics. Guest editor Allan Haverholm, in his accompanying essay, notes that comics "aren't inherently narrative, their form not necessarily linear. Those are restraints set by the entertainment industry that comics never really escaped." What would it look like, then, to abandon those restraints—to do away with or reimagine comics' use of storytelling devices like captions or word balloons, linear narrative, even sequential order–replacing those tools with "abstract, suggestive, and ambiguous" elements more commonly associated with contemporary art or the avant-garde?

For answers, this volume turns to the work of a remarkable set of contributors, a veritable "who's who" of optically adventurous creators from across the globe: Tym Godek [US], Kimball Anderson [US], Warren Craghead III [US], Simon Russell [UK], Anastasia Hiorns [UK], Gareth A Hopkins [UK], Tana Oshima [JP/ES/US], Rosaire Appel [US], allison anne [US], William Lillstjärna [SE], Louis Deux [US], Mark Badger [US], Miika Nyyssönen [FI], Shaun Gardiner [UK], Laurel Lynn Leake [US], Churchdoor Lounger [US], and Mattias Elftorp [SE].

Softcover, full-color, 180 pages. 26 × 20 × 1,26 cm (approximately 10 inches by 8 inches), with a wrap-around cover image by Nonmachinable co-founder Jeremy P. Bushnell.