The Silent and the Sequential: Wordless Comics
As part of an upcoming review of Love: The Tiger, my mind turned to one of my favourite topics - the silent or wordless comic. Silent comics are, for whatever reasons, not often covered despite their unique accessibility and pure artistic focus.
I first encountered the idea of silent comics during my MLitt in Comic Studies - a module on International Comics featured 3" (2011) by Marc-Antoine Mathieu and Arzach (1975) by Moebius - and I was immediately transfixed.
Both comics utilised the concept of complete silence and yet they could not be more different, with 3" spanning a whole 3 seconds in moment to moment transitions that bounced between perspectives like a manic pinball in contrast to the sweeping epic of the fantastical and phallical Arzach.