Article with all-black illustrations: The story of Cut'n'Splash and Collected Black Panels

This is an article in which all illustrations are merely a black squares. Because it is a nice idea and i wanted to test it out. Sometimes it happens that way. Here's the story. I was looking for a gallery show to visit after work and stumbled upon an article which described an art-show designed to imitate the experience of the blind. The text was so-so but the illustration was top notch - just black squares. It was a nice touch in otherwise throwaway piece.

However this is just an excuse to talk about my long running project nobody cares about also known as Collected Black Panels. What is it? As it says on the tin - it is all about gathering black panels from various comic books and other sources. All sorts of black gathered together in the most pointless and excessively abstract collage possible. Why? Because nobody ever tried to do that (because it is mindbogglingly meaningless waste of time).

How this whole thing started? I'm a late-convert in terms of reading comic books. Sure, i've read Triple M (Miller, Moore, Morrison) "Required reading" list and some webcomics but it never really consumed me in a truly fan obsession. I also owned a copy of "ElfQuest" when i was a kid and it is still one of my favs. Then in May of 2015 i was reeling off incredibly convoluted and misguided attempt at moviemaking. Being crushed and devastated by the circumstances - i was unable to do anything for a while. And that's where comic books came to rescue. 

While pointlessly surfing on the web - i've came to some comic book related website where I've read an article about Batman's story arc "Knightfall". It was described as "Batman's having a very long, hard day which pushes him to the limit". This description really interested me. I've downloaded the story arc and started reading. It was incredible. Up to the point of Bane's "Break You" moment - i thought it was the best thing ever. It was all-killer, no-filler balls to the wall action. Then came Jean-Paul Valley Azrael-Batman and his ridiculous costume and things went south. But one thing really entertained me - Azbats facial expressions. For some reason i thought it was perfect avatar-picture fodder. And so i started to snap all the headshots of Azbats. Every each of them. I was going back and forth through the comic book looking for Azbats face. It was reinvirogating in so many ways.

Then i started to notice that some panels look very different and they can be extracted outside of their original context and reappropriated elsewhere. I started to gaze through comic books looking for a panel to step. I started hoarding them for no particular reason. Right around that time i came back to Grail Marcus' "Lipstick Traces" (my go-to book when feeling sad and lonely) and read about Lettrist antics. And i thought "Well, since i have nothing else to do - why don't try something completely different". That's how "Cut'n'Splash" was born. It was June 2015.

At first "Cut'n'Splash" was merely a place where i could drop my favorite panels from various comic books. But as time went by i realized that some panels connect with each other and construct some sort of abstract narrative. And so i started to arrange panels in a specific way in order to tell the story without even having an idea what it was. By July "Cut'n'Splash" transformed from just another "comic book stuff" to warped and twisted infinite collage comic strip that was telling something backwards. Since it is really hard to compose long narrative within Tumblr - i was consumed by making short vignettes. After a while i started to shift to more abstract-impressionist kind of story telling - something akin to kaleidoscope. 

Then reality took its tool and i was forced to move out to another city. Workload wasn't creativity-friendly and so "Cut'n'Splash" was left abandoned for a better half of 2016 (although i've composed a better half of "Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious" around the same time). The only time in 2016 "Cut'n'Splash" was in the works was in-between two jobs in October. In November i've landed in another place which was much more relaxed and creativity-friendly. Slowly i started to get my groove back and by March 2017 i was ready to restart "Cut'n'Splash" with a new found drive. That's where "Collected Black Panels" comes in. 

Black panels were one of those things that instantly fascinated me. It is something of a rarity in comic books. Because purely black panel is a waste of space that can be used to tell a story. Within a story's context black panel can really improve the narrative by letting the reader imagine certain events. But usually it is just a blackout or signifier of passage of time. It takes a considerable skill to use it to maximum effect. My first big encounter with black panels was in one of the Frank Miller books. I guess it was "Daredevil: Love and War". There were two sequences of black panels. It was incredible. After a while i've found out that there are lots of abstract monochrome panels sometimes wordless, sometimes with some exclamations or comments. Some of them found its way to "Cut'n'Splash" (i've used black panels to punctuate transitions between episodes) but the majority were left unused.

In March i started to read "Love and Rockets". One of the things that impressed me about it was the way black panels were used. They were telling the stories on their own. It was something like David Mazzuchelli's adaptation of Paul Auster "City of Glass" (the best comic book ever, btw) - really abstract but endlessly fascinating. It left me puzzled. I had no idea what to do with it. I had several hundred of black panels of all sorts and i kept hoarding more and more of them. And then it struck me "I have a lot of black panels too!" and the very next thing i did was registering another blog aptly titled "Collected Black Panels". 

The concept is simple: to construct infinite abstract collage comic strip made completely out of monochrome panels. Sure it is a bit silly to use purely black panels - considerable part of the snaps contains onomatopoeia, exclamations, parts of the dialogue, some comments, etc. It all adds up to an imaginary narrative that don't even exist in the thing but in the reader's mind while perceiving it. Why bother doing that? Because while there are lots of examples of Black Paintings - no one ever tried to construct Black Panel collage and never really tried to simply collect black panels. 

At the time of writing this text "Collected Black Panels" contains over five hundred of monochrome panels of all forms and times from so many different comic books i doubt i'll ever be able to recall even some of the sources.