Picture Writing was the name of my art school thesis many years back. In the thesis I struggled to express my fascination with everything from Andy Capp to Krazy Kat, and cuneiform to airplane safety instructions. I quickly was overwhelmed not only by the plethora of examples that fit an admittedly broad topic, but also my own visceral reactions to samples that crossed my path. Where words and pictures were required to unfold together I was often irritated. Rarely do the two jive. I'd love the images but would find the writing unsatisfactory. When the two do come together, as they do in George Herriman's Krazy Kat (and I have yet to meet anyone who would disagree with this 'certainty') the results are magical. For further examples of where the low of comics and the high of art are erased, check out the exhibiton catalogue, High and Low, from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The show featured (amongst others) Philip Guston, Robert Crumb, and (if memory serves) artists from Raw, the breath of fresh air that broke into the comics scene at the end of the 1970s, compiled and edited by Art Spiegleman and François Mouly.
Soon to come: Essays, stolen (with thanks), from the WWW on Frans Masareel, Henri Michaux, Pierre Alechinsky and many, many more artists who fit into my ever widening, ever elusive definition of the pictographic realm.
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