Perth Voice Interactive

COMICS and novels have more in common than you’d think at first glance, curator of Comic Tragics at the WA Art Gallery Robert Cook says.

“It’s just a different way of telling stories. Novelists use words to evoke images and comics go one step further.”

Pictures are the craft of the comic writer, but the gap between each panel play a part, Cook says.

“The gap is where you create the image in your mind as well.”

The exhibition’s 150 images are not the stuff of Marvel or DC Comics super heroes, but about everyday mundane life: “[Whether] tragic or melancholy [they] start to become about the human condition,” Cook says.

“[The works] reflect individual obsessions and introspection, underscored with the anxieties and paradoxes of modern life – it is darkly intriguing and wonderfully touching.”

The images create landscapes of the mind, Cook says: “[That] is part of the pleasure…You are going on a journey to different lands.”

Nine contemporary comic artists were chosen for the exhibition, and Emma Talbot and Stephen Collins, from the UK, Aisha Franz (Germany), the US’ Ron Regé junior, Anders Nilsen, John Porcellino, Gabrielle Bell, Dash Shaw, and Australia’s Tommi Parrish, are considered some of the best in the world.

Comics have shifted from “the ghetto”, or something just for kids, to that of art, Cook says: “They are powerfully resonating artworks. The works speak to people and have a unique level of sophistication – and it just happened they are comic-type people.”

The exhibition pushes the idea of comics in new, and confronting ways, changing the way people think about them, Cook says.

“You will walk two steps in [to the exhibition]…and will see it as art work.”

Comic Tragics was exclusively curated for WA audiences, and is aimed at showing the way art is developing and shifting, director Stefano Carboni says. “We are inviting our audiences to see things differently. One aspect of this…is to curate exhibitions that inspire visitors with their presentations of different directions that art forms are taking.”

The free exhibition is on at the WA Art Gallery until June 25.

by JENNY D’ANGER