Jon Jones (jbmjphoto@gmail.com – no website unfortunately) and I had some interesting conversations over his work – images inspired by noir comics. While I’ve seen a lot of work inspired by comics and noir film – often the artist posits the end goal as the standard gallery display. When looking at these images in critique, that’s always rubbed me the wrong way.

Jones seemed aware of this and we talked about his goal of an actual comic book – but keeping the high production values of his imagery. I think this is a great direction and I hope to see how it comes out – there is a serious lack of sequential art produced in the photographic medium (at least much good stuff) and I’m always willing to cheer on anyone willing to tackle the considerable challenges inherent in it.

Comics usually work because of a certain level of removal from reality – the ability for characters to be owned by the reader because of their more generic representational nature – and the abstract action of drawing that not many can accomplish with a camera. It’s something that a more indexical art like photography might have problems with – though even as I type this I’m not as sure, since modern oomics seem to leave room for more and more definite depictions of characters and don’t seem to indulge in the same kind of psychadelic action sequences of the comics I’m most aquainted with. I guess I’m not really an expert, but I’ll ask someone on the sequential faculty at scad about it when I get home.

Anyway, here’s fingers crossed = a lot of comics are done from photo reference and hopefully Jon will gracefully complete the circle.