This is my obligatory web-comic post (with more definitely to come). Dresden Codak is transhumanist, absurdist, philosophical, strange, confusing, funny, brilliant, and REALLY beautiful comic by Aaron Diaz. Having majored in Physics, Anthropology, Computer Science and then Art, in that order, Diaz embraced each discipline when creating the Codak and I admit that it makes the comic somewhat hard to read. However, if you cannot make it past the overly brainy bits – skip to the overly silly bits and just enjoy the imagery. Trouble with fitting any of that imagery onto a blogger entry is that a) Mr. Diaz fully embraced the concept of “infinite canvas” and many pages of Dresden Codak are really bloody long and b) the God of Atheism must have spoken to the artist and said: “Aaron – though shall go nuts with the panels!” and the artist said “Don’t mind if I do!”
There are panels of all shapes and sizes, panels with borders defined by parts of the image, panels where borders are camouflaged and panels without any borders at all, and it all WORKS (although, yes, the order does get a liiiiiiitle confusing at times.
I don’t mind. It’s too damn pretty for me to mind, andб yes, I am a sucker for transhumanist ideas.
Dresden Codak can be found here: http://dresdencodak.com/
Aaron Diaz’s very insightful and self-deprecating blog is here: http://dresdencodak.tumblr.com/
It's true it is kinda hard to fallow but the inventive gutters are well, inventive. The facial expressions are impressive because of the broadness of emotions shown versus most main stream comics.
ReplyDeleteI did not find this hard to follow at all, but that might be from years of reading American comics frontwards, and Japanese comics backwards, and just learning to adapt to various comic-styles. I liked the coloring techniques, and how smooth everything looks. I also really like the weird perspective angles of the panels, it makes it very visually interesting. The only problem I can really see is that I am really interested in the art, but not the story, and a comic artist has got to grab our attention in both fields. But I would give this a chance, maybe after a few more pages my mind might change.
ReplyDeleteoh my. i think you just introduced myself to my new favorite comic, this is right up my alley, i love snarky, future-y, philosophical stuff.
ReplyDeletebut since this is an illustration blog, ill comment on the art a bit. I REALLY like his use of frames. it's neither random nor very linear, but it serves the narrative quite well. looking through the artist's other comics i can see that he can work in several different styles, while keeping the "look" consistent throughout each comic, which is an important skill for illustrators to have.