Back
in 2010, London based publishing house Nobrow Press printed a 176
page, four color hardback anthology called A
Graphic Cosmogony
in which “twenty
four artists take on seven pages each to tell their tales of the
creation of everything...”
and, thankfully, it's just recently come back into print.
It's
sublime, meditative, resplendent, and just that good. While it
certainly highlights the individual contributors within its pages, it
also stands as a testament to the innate power that can arise out of
a carefully curated anthology
As
with most Nobrow releases, A
Graphic Cosmogony
is a thing of beauty, elegantly crafted. The anthology hovers in that
liminal space between an art book and a comic book, as each creator
brings to their seven pages a unique understanding and depiction of
the myth of creation. Ranging from the traditional to the surreal,
profound to the comical, each presentation could exist as a
mini-comic on its own. Put together, though, they gain a further
layer of meaning through their juxtaposition, commenting, in a way,
on the work that proceeds and follows. While
some artists are more successful than others, taken as a whole each
piece becomes a necessary part of the larger puzzle. Out of the
cacophony and chaos implicit in twenty four voices singing their own
interpretation of a similar theme, editor Alex Spiro and assistant
editor Ben Newman craft a work that fills the room with a pitch
perfect orgiastic canticle, a nuanced symphony to exult the senses.
In
his introduction to the anthology, Paul Gravett writes, “what
better means than comics, the distillation of illuminated
manuscripts, tapestries, meditational paintings and decorated scrolls
and all of humanities’ narrative arts, to tell that oldest story of
them all, the story of creation?”
When artists deal with ideas surrounding creation myths, one can't
help but see them commenting on their understanding of their own
process as well, the fundamentals of creativity, the machinations of
art, the work inherent in forming inspiration into product. As
each artist tells their own myth of creation, they also give the
reader insight into their own ideas about creating.
The
list of contributors is impressive: Stuart
Kolakovic, Mikkel Sommers, Brecht Vandenbroucke, Luke Best, Rob
Hunter, Jon McNaught, Ben Newman, Andrew Rae, Luke Pearson, Jack
Teagle, Jon Boam, Jakob Hindrichs, Clayton Junior, Daniel Locke,
Isabel Greenberg, Mike Bertino, Nick White, Rui Tenreiro, Sean
Hudson, Luc Melanson, Katia Fouquet, Yeji Yun, Matthew Lyons, and
Liesbeth De Stercke. Each artist demonstrates their nuance of
storytelling while also highlighting their particular style. The
anthology speaks to the myriad possibilities comics have in terms of
narrative, representation, tone, and craft.
A
Graphic Cosmogony is a book, first and foremost. The tactile
experience of turning each thick page becomes integral to the
experience of consumption. The very texture and weight of the paper
and the push back of its tight binding make reading A Graphic
Cosmogony so much more immersive then tapping on a tablet or
scrolling with a mouse. Even its surprising lightness, given that it
is a 176 page hardback book, makes reading the anthology a physical
event. It's what Nobrow, as a publisher, does best.
Paul
Gravett ends his introduction to A
Graphic Cosmogony
by writing, “Pull
up a rock and gather round the flickering fire - the universe is
about to be born again…” This is a thing to enjoy. This is an anthology you should experience
for yourself.
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