posted by Allan Haverholm on Nov 25

First things first; who am I? what the hell is this? and what for?

I’m a comic creator. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, the term is coined to cover the instances when one person both writes and draws a comic. You may also notice that I use the phrase “comic” rather than “graphic novel”. That’s not to say, “Your dad’s old, worn superhero mags,” but comics as such, everything spatially sequential. Hopefully, in a few minutes you will understand why I pick such nit.

Astoria is a project that I’ve been building myself up to over the last eighteen months, the visual equivalent of a rock album. I’ve been wanting to try my hand on more experimental narrative, and less formulaic content – more telling, less story, so to speak. Since I did the first version of “Ariadne” (which is part of Astoria) I’ve been shadowboxing with the notion of visual language or narrative as a precursor to the written word, superior in some ways, and an altogether different beast. I’ll get into details in a later post, I promise!

More personally, I had become conscious of the gap there was between what goes into my head and what comes out. I am a massive consumer of music, mostly some form of guitar-based, rock-ish din, but I tend to stray into unknown territory. And of course, music communicates feelings and sensations like probably no other medium; on the other hand was my disenchantment with traditional comics, or at least the rut I had dug in it for myself.

Things started to come together fast, then. Who’s to say that visual language might not convey the same, or similarly intuitive feelings as music? The pantomime, or “silent” comic is as ambivalently evocative as a melody. And many of the story ideas that I had discarded in the past (due to their lack of plot) suddenly made sense in an equivocal context. And hey, I like the gatefold covers for my old vinyls to death, is that reason to make a 12″ square book, collecting those individual ideas like songs on a record? I think it is!

So, you see, Astoria is kind of hard to define. Part rock album, part art comic, part coffee table book, all three shaken and stirred into some hybrid thing that I for one haven’t seen or heard of before.

Whoops! I’m approaching the 400 word mark, and blog readers’ attention span being what it is, I’ll cut a long story short. Better to save some air for coming posts Thank you for listening!