Permanent Ink: Comic Book and Comic Strip Art as Aesthetic Object

Andrei Molotiu, the Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, explores the formal characteristics of comic art and the fragmentation caused by showing framed pages that were originally created for publication and separated from their indigenous context, wondering if this separation is ultimately an act of creativity or an act of violence. This chapter explains white-out, margin notations, and how the eye is drawn to different things in an image when it’s isolated on the wall. In this 2006 essay, he focuses on the art of Jack Kirby, Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo 4, Metamorpho, Joe Palooka, Archie, Josie, Tom and Jerry, and "Sooper Hippie.” In this 2018 update to his 2006 essay, Andrei Molotiu, the Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, returns to his analysis of the formal characteristics of original comic art as seen in exhibitions, exhibit catalogs, and high-end artist’s editions that faithfully reproduce full size comics originals, such as the IDW Artist’s edition of David Mazzucchelli’s and Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again (images). Molotiu briefly discusses the proliferation of comic art exhibits and contrasts the experience of reading a full issue of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi on the wall at the Comic Book Apocalypse show at CSU Northridge and in print in an artist’s edition.