This is a show of international comic art, made by artists from a myriad of generations and backgrounds. With the work on view, we see that the finest comics are the ones that are also the most artistically free. Comics' relationship with the term ‘art’ is a complicated one. The industry around comics prizes, above all, simplicity, stories told to be understood at all costs, ambiguity treated as a mistake to be avoided. Clarity reigns over abstraction of any kind. And yet there is a tradition in comics of cartoonists who do not make their work with the goal of conveying information as starkly and simply as possible. Instead, these artists make drawings in sequence that are to be felt for a lifetime rather than understood within seconds. Expressive image making in sequence is a way to describe what the artists in this show explore. Their work points back to the very beginnings of the form, to artists like Lionel Feininger and George Herriman. The work on view here hails from all corners of the globe, Japan, Germany, France, Mexico, Argentina, Austria and The United States, and from a cross section of generations. We seek to show comics of this kind as a decades long international movement. ‘New Comic Day’ is the term comic stores that sell Spider-Man and Batman use to refer to Wednesday, the day new releases come in. This show imagines that day filled not with corporate made comics made and instead with radical graphic narratives.
