Beginning with the experiments of Saul Steinberg, through some of the morepsychedelic creations of R. Crumb, and more recently, cartoonists created comicswhose panels contain little to no representational imagery, and which tell nostories. Reduced to the panel grid, brushstrokes, and sometimes colors, abstractcomics highlight the formal mechanisms that underlie all comics. The firstcollection devoted to this genre, Abstract Comics: The Anthology , isedited by Andrei Molotiu, an art historian and contemporary abstract-comiccreator. It gathers the best abstract comics so far, including early experimentsby Gary Panter, Moebius, Patrick McDonnell, and Lewis Trondheim, and pieces bylittle-known pioneers such as Benoit Joly, Bill Boichel and Jeff Zenick, as wellas by recent practitioners such as Ibn al Rabin, Billy Mavreas, Mark StaffBrandl, and many others. Abstract Comics also features first attempts,commissioned specifically for this anthology, by well-known cartoonists such asJames Kochalka, Ivan Brunetti, J.R. Williams and Warren Craghead.
