In defence of dots

I've always love comic books, they had a huge influence on me as a child, and I had a pile at least two foot high, which I collected over a period of about four years when I was in my early teens.

I particularly loved the romance, WonderWoman and Superman comics. I wish I'd kept them, I'm sure they'd still inspire me, with their evocative and powerful archetypal images, all made the more emotional because of the dots somehow. (like what one imagines to be swirling molecules or atoms...always keeping one's feelings on the edge and stirred....)

When I went to Art School in the late sixties, I was delighted to find Lichtenstein ofcourse.

I found this image along with some great words and other fantastic edits here

Kabala 2

In Defense of Dots: The lost art of comic books

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event.

This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.

—Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)

From the 1940s to the 1970s, comic book art and comic books were the same thing. In the decades since, the art of comics has been carefully separated from the original physical conditions of its reproduction. Elevation of the 20th century art form has resulted in the erasure of the 20th century mechanical processes that enabled comic books to exist and thrive – for ten, twelve, fifteen, or twenty cents, millions of times over.

It was an economic bargain that significantly defined the aesthetic terms of comic books: cheap paper, cheap printing, and four-color separations that could not hide their limitations. These accidental aesthetics governed the experience of comics for generations, were appropriated for fine art in the 1960s, and today fall into the “retro” category of graphic design.