Experimental Sequential 2

No. 22

For the impatient, today’s actual comic exists in a miro board. More details in the post below, but it’s an old project from the early 2010s and it’s particular form factor doesn’t really work any other way.

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Around 2006 I started working on an experimental comic. It was laid out on a grid with interconnected stories much like a crossword. It could be read from left to right, right to left, up, down, and diagonal. Some stories even skipped around the grid.

Each panel, an inch square in the original draft, would be 4.5 inches square in their final form. At 20 panels across the entire piece would end up around 8 feet to a side. Due to it’s size and lack of a means to share it physically or digitally, the project remained unrealized for over half a decade.

Then in 2012 my friend Bizhan who at the time was heavily involved with Gallery5 in Richmond, Virginia, told me about a comics exhibition he was curating. A former fire station, Gallery5 had huge walls. More than big enough to accommodate the project. Soon I was on the billing and had to deliver a rather large, very incomplete project.

I spent the next couple months in heavy production mode. Churning out panels as fast as I could while arranging to have them scanned printed and mounted on ceramic tiles. Eventually everything came together and what had been the source of so much excitement, doubt, and fear, became a font of great pride as I finally had the chance to see what I had envisioned for so long become a reality.

It’s been nearly 2 decades since this project’s inception. And while it will never see the walls of a gallery again I have finally found a suitable digital alternative. It works pretty well as a Miro board where you can pan and zoom easily.

Fair warning, as I was perusing the interwoven little stories again, I’m reminded of just how weird this thing really was. Probably not safe for work or kiddos.

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