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Explosive Comic
Created in 2001 but not publicly released until 2017, 'Explosive Comic' is arguably the first great collage comic of the 21st century.
This 18-page collage sequence distills the basic thematic tendencies of male-oriented mainstream comics — blood-soaked fever dreams of cars, women, guns and mayhem — into a concentrated and explosive narrative gesture. Both meta-comic and visual poem, the meticulously assembled paper sequence was built a panel at a time, with many elements going into the creation of a single collaged frame. Using only scissors and glue, countless source comics needed to be studied and cold-heartedly dissected (a collector’s worst nightmare) to find just the right parts to create each page, and to adhere to the panel forms that drive the correct reading of narrative comics.
Giving the work a literary grounding, Laliberte has long referred to 'Explosive Comic' as a score for a sound poem, a babble-chorus created for the inner ear. Sonic in nature, the sequence is driven by the mental kinetics that goes into enlivening a reading of the cryptic story tags, pain-laden word bubbles and combustible sound captions; it’s a noisy text, to be sure.
This 18-page collage sequence distills the basic thematic tendencies of male-oriented mainstream comics — blood-soaked fever dreams of cars, women, guns and mayhem — into a concentrated and explosive narrative gesture. Both meta-comic and visual poem, the meticulously assembled paper sequence was built a panel at a time, with many elements going into the creation of a single collaged frame. Using only scissors and glue, countless source comics needed to be studied and cold-heartedly dissected (a collector’s worst nightmare) to find just the right parts to create each page, and to adhere to the panel forms that drive the correct reading of narrative comics.
Giving the work a literary grounding, Laliberte has long referred to 'Explosive Comic' as a score for a sound poem, a babble-chorus created for the inner ear. Sonic in nature, the sequence is driven by the mental kinetics that goes into enlivening a reading of the cryptic story tags, pain-laden word bubbles and combustible sound captions; it’s a noisy text, to be sure.
24 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2017
About the author
Mark Laliberte
13 books15 followersMark Laliberte is a Southern Ontario-based writer/artist/designer whose poems and pageworks have appeared in publications big and small, including Descant, Ink Brick, Poetry, prairie fire, Prefix Photo, subTerrain and Vallum. Recent solo books include asemanticasymmetry (Anstruther), BookBook (above/ground) and Explosive Comic (Swimmers Group). His writing has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the City of Windsor's Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.
Laliberte is also a member of MA|DE, an exploratory collaborative writing entity, whose first full-length book of poetry, ZZOO, is set to debut with Palimpsest Press on their Anstruther Books imprint in Spring 2025 (pre-order a copy at https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/zzoo... ); they have also completed their next two collections, Alphabeticals and Detourism (forthcoming 2028).
Laliberte was editor and designer of the Canadian hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL (http://carouselmagazine.ca/) for a 20-year period (36 issues completed, 2002-23), publisher at the experimental comics press Popnoir Editions from 2016-21, and curator of the international constraint-based comics community The 4PANEL Project (https://4panel.ca/); he recently retired from all these positions to focus exclusively on his own work — and has now completed his latest manuscript, Circularities.
Laliberte is also a member of MA|DE, an exploratory collaborative writing entity, whose first full-length book of poetry, ZZOO, is set to debut with Palimpsest Press on their Anstruther Books imprint in Spring 2025 (pre-order a copy at https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/zzoo... ); they have also completed their next two collections, Alphabeticals and Detourism (forthcoming 2028).
Laliberte was editor and designer of the Canadian hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL (http://carouselmagazine.ca/) for a 20-year period (36 issues completed, 2002-23), publisher at the experimental comics press Popnoir Editions from 2016-21, and curator of the international constraint-based comics community The 4PANEL Project (https://4panel.ca/); he recently retired from all these positions to focus exclusively on his own work — and has now completed his latest manuscript, Circularities.
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