<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n Dorothy Iannone, "An Icelandic Saga." Installation view, New Museum. <\/p><\/div>\n Each page in the Saga<\/em> roughly stands as a single panel (or panel-less page). Iannone uses hand-lettered text\u2014commentaries, flashbacks, and interludes as well as detailed lists and shipboard menus\u2014in cursive and block fonts to tell the story, and the black-and-white images mainly consist of flattened, front-facing figures. There aren\u2019t any word balloons, but Iannone\u2019s writing, in first- and third-person, moves between narration, reminiscence, and introspection. In her early paintings\u2014Big Baby<\/em> from 1962\u20133 is a great example\u2014you can see a kind of regulation of the picture space. Though she doesn\u2019t use a grid, the painting\u2019s vertical and horizontal lines arguably perform the same function panels would, directing the flow of the painting and organizing the forms within it. In one essay on her work, the author compared these lines to Matisse\u2019s use of axes in his late collages. Matisse himself writes, \u201cThe plumb line defines the vertical and together with its counterpart, the horizontal, forms the draftsman\u2019s compass . . . The \u2018arabesque\u2019 develops around these imaginary lines.\u201d Sounds like abstract comics.<\/p>\n In a figurative painting from 1970, called The Next Great Moment in History Is Ours<\/em>, the lines actually become panels, though the various figures (the \u201carabesques\u201d) arrayed around a central woman often break those barriers. Yet even when they\u2019re unable to contain a figure\u2019s actions, the panels still symbolize a structural rigor.<\/p>\n "The Next Great Moment Is Ours"<\/p><\/div>\n Another example is At Home<\/em>, 1969, which maps out the interior of the artist\u2019s house. We perceive the boxes\/boundaries even if they don\u2019t control our reading of the art.<\/p>\n "At Home"<\/p><\/div>\n It\u2019s the kind of orgy of form (pun totally intended)\u2014where a thousand things occur on a page or spread, but they\u2019re all still related\u2014that I\u2019d expect from J. H. Williams, especially in Promethea<\/em>, where the images are positively metaphysical, but also in his recently completed run on Detective Comics<\/em>. (There\u2019s something of this, too, in Killoffer\u2019s deranged Mobius strips.)<\/p>\n Page from "Promethea"<\/p><\/div>\n In the Iannone and in a page like this from Promethea<\/em>, where do you look first? And does it really matter? There\u2019s still a sense of story, of narrative progression, but the images act more as emblems than as explanatory illustrations of each and every act. (In the late \u201950s and early \u201960s, Iannone traveled throughout Asia and Europe where she was exposed to Japanese woodcuts, tantric painting, and Byzantine mosaics. The forms all often work from an emblematic or symbolic foundation, as does Egyptian art.) Certainly, there are instances of these kinds of pages in lots of comics (another great example is JT Waldman\u2019s Megillat Esther<\/em> and Lauren Weinstein\u2019s quadruple-page spread for Ganzfeld<\/em> 7); the difference is that Icelandic Saga<\/em> consists only of these kinds of pages.<\/p>\n Double-page spread (badly scanned) from "Megillat Esther"<\/p><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/comicscomicsmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Saga-Installation1.jpg\")
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\nThough Iannone wouldn\u2019t begin An Icelandic Saga<\/em> until her affair with Roth had ended, she started working in that form when their relationship began in 1967. Her Dialogues<\/em> are straightforward comics. Dialogue I<\/em>, for instance, consists of six pages that relate the story of her getting into bed and turning out the light. Each page is a single panel, some with dialogue, some silent. About this series, Iannone says, \u201cI made art out of the things we said to each other.\u201d She studied literature at Boston University before embarking on painting, and much of her artwork contains text. Even the paintings about her relationship with Roth convey, in a sense, the story of their love through individual moments. But in thinking specifically about comics, her early move from abstraction to figuration reveals an impulse to arrange the canvas so that it might be read as much as looked at.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>