Pull quote

Pull quote was originally published in CBA #56&57: Uncomics, a collection of works guest-edited by Allen Haverholm meant to ‘unmake’ comics. This unusual prompt challenged me to almost entirely drop text, representational imagery, and narrative and embrace abstraction instead. My goal was to create a sequence of pages with echoes of comics structures like panels and gutters and that can still be ‘read’ even without a strict left-to-right and up-to-down format.

I began this comic by lightly tracing the underlying shapes in magazines called page architecture – pictures, headers, articles, ads, etc. – and used them as a foundation for coloured pencil and marker abstractions. This led to unexpected images that shook me out of my usual style. This interestingly abstract ‘readability’ allows readers to drift through Pull quote taking in the soft, melting forms on the pages in their own ways – maybe as physical spaces, tangible objects or simply flat colours.

The title comes from the term for short quotes that editors pluck from an article and feature as attention-grabbing headers or graphics. Print magazines have a certain visual architecture that is unique to the medium, and tailored to different genres and purposes and that language has been proliferated through ‘western’ graphic design in general. But all these design choices are usually invisible to the reader, existing to move us smoothly through an article from beginning to end (including the ads). Although I took these unseen shapes and let them take centre stage, my process does not result in neat, legible graphic design. Instead, it produces chaotic tangles of organic and angular forms that cannot be easily organized by the eye. Even if the reader does not know about the tracing process I used or the meaning of the title, I think it resulted in abstractions with a nagging sense of familiarity and that evoke some of the information overload of contemporary life.