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Bacter-Area
posted February 10, 2006
 



Creators: Keith Jones
Publishing Information: Drawn and Quarterly, 2006
Ordering Numbers:

As part of D&Q's Petits Livres series, Keith Jones' Bacter-Area is printed at a small, almost square size -- I'm guessing five inches by five and a half inches. This has a strange effect on the art, which at a larger size feels like a giant canvas filled for effect but held in your hand feel like compact scenes more easily taken as a whole than a sum of parts. It's almost like stepping back to see the view of a fussy, buzzing world instead of concentrating on one bug at a time. Jones' take on color, unconstrained by figure or line and object, sometimes forcing through all three like passing waves of radiation, would prove compelling at any size. In the larger collages, you might find yourself drifiting in and out of visual sympathy with the art on the basis of which color you eye tries to hold all at once. It's a neat little art book, and if the joy you get out of comics comes from looking at art and figure out oblique reference from picture to picture, you should consider picking this up. It should be a fun series of books.