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Architecture of an Atom
Juliacks is a comic artist whose work—crude, ornate, subjective and dreamy—is not for those who prefer their narrative crisp and tidy. —The New York Times
[Juliacks's] cartoony and sometimes abstracted character design, her use of decorative drawings to reinforce other images and ideas on the page, and the way she modulates emotion by varying panel and letter size lends her comics a tremendous amount of impact. She's part of a group of artists that move with relative ease between the world of comics and fine-art, helping to redefine how we think about both. —The Comics Journal
With Architecture of an Atom, internationally recognized multi-disciplinary artist Juliacks brings her trans-media project to the print realm. Characterized by critics as a member of the immersive school of cartooning, she has sought to trouble the boundaries between fine art and comics throughout her career. A socially conscious, layered work in every sense of the word.
Juliacks is an artist, filmmaker, performer-choreographer, cartoonist, and playwright who splits her time between New Jersey, where she recently received a 2016 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Netherlands. She's been published and performed in various cities across North America and throughout Europe, her most recent project being the trans-media story Architecture of an Atom.
[Juliacks's] cartoony and sometimes abstracted character design, her use of decorative drawings to reinforce other images and ideas on the page, and the way she modulates emotion by varying panel and letter size lends her comics a tremendous amount of impact. She's part of a group of artists that move with relative ease between the world of comics and fine-art, helping to redefine how we think about both. —The Comics Journal
With Architecture of an Atom, internationally recognized multi-disciplinary artist Juliacks brings her trans-media project to the print realm. Characterized by critics as a member of the immersive school of cartooning, she has sought to trouble the boundaries between fine art and comics throughout her career. A socially conscious, layered work in every sense of the word.
Juliacks is an artist, filmmaker, performer-choreographer, cartoonist, and playwright who splits her time between New Jersey, where she recently received a 2016 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Netherlands. She's been published and performed in various cities across North America and throughout Europe, her most recent project being the trans-media story Architecture of an Atom.
- GenresComicsArtGraphic Novels
296 pages, Hardcover
First published June 13, 2017
42 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 30, 2017
“We are lost.”
Been reading, as I have, lots of conventional novels, and wondering if you might dip your toes into the waters of Something New, something truly different? Julliacks’s The Architecture of an Atom, is a kind of breath-taking, experimental/alternative graphic novel/film series that I am inclined to call a comics poem, as the links between images are never obvious or clear. It’s a 300+ page dream state, ten years in the making, with yes, some consistent characters all outlined at the beginning and end, and there’s a loose story line, but fasten your seat belt for a dizzying ride through color and form and experimental storytelling. It’s not easy to figure out what is going on, and is not exactly a relaxing, straightforward read, just to stae the obvious.
You even get an Atom passport when you begin the journey. And “the story begins with red, purple, the colors of organs, healthy, beating hard.” It focuses on a friendship between Frida and Cohl and a trip they make together to “a metaphysical France.” There are others they meet there and become friends with. The whole occasion feels initially youthful, like The Trip To Europe After University, though it then turns darker, a sober coming-of-age story. Drugs and alcohol would also seem to be involved, as the telling, while dreamlike, also seems hallucinatory.
Sometimes the art feels like a Paris street mural, or tagging, sometimes sketchy, but it is never boring. The colors and experimentation are often lovely, romantic. Scraps of poetry or narration float by as in Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, or Dorothy’s fall to Oz, objects appearing and disappearing: “Today we learn to breathe.” “Bring in soft noise.” France, don’t forget is a beautiful country, a place of art, and the reinvention of art, especially a metaphysical France, I suppose, but then things turn a little scary: “We are lost.” “Hunting, they are desperate.”
These are some keys Julliacks provides, once we are done with our reading:
The Architecture of an Atom is “a transmedia polyphonic science fiction love tragedy and gesammtkunstwerk whose structure is based upon that of an atom containing a feature film, a comix art book and a series of ‘infinite whistle’ performance films about the fantasies and self-created conflicts of groups.”
“The wavy time of relationships that creates their own time through patterns.”
“Note: Everyone in this story tries to speak another language playfully but with difficulty.”
Juliacks says it is “a comic book that is also a series of paintings, drawings and prints.”
Love happens, moving from like to love, from friendship to something more: “When I die, you will shoot my ashes into the water. . . and we will be one forever.”
Lost in the woods, lost in the water; there’s some loss and grief “Breathe. Gone.”
Many wordless pages, abstract, reflective paintings. Color as commentary.
The book ends with “the infinite whistle,” a tin whistle that she describes as “a syncretic psycho-magical 'placebo object, that incites, refracts and destroys the couple, shattering the whole.”
In other words, the summer relationship ends! People connect, disconnect, move on!
That whistle reminds me of ee cummings:
in Just- spring when the world is mud-luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come. running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing
Only the tune turns darker in Julliacks’s version of the poem, at childhood’s end: “The flame grew in the trees that we planted last year when Frida and Cohl” ended.
And then there is the film, which runs parallel to the comic book, which was done before the book. And also some “spin-off” short films, called Tin Whistle. Have seen one, that looks like abstract performance art, an image of a man in psychological awakening.
Is it juvenilia, tagging pages in a book vs. art? That’s your call. What becomes art is usually ridiculed in the time of its conception. Will this be part of the guide to art in the coming years? I am not an expert, but it feels new and fresh and colorful and interesting. And the alt-comics community is all in with Julliacks, so I will look into it some more.
Film teaser from Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/87274159
The 2Cloud Publishers presenting about the project:
http://2dcloud.tumblr.com/post/163676...
This is roughly ten years of work from Julliacks; here’s more about the project, worth skimming at the very least, though it seems a little overwhelming, admittedly:
http://www.archatom.org
Been reading, as I have, lots of conventional novels, and wondering if you might dip your toes into the waters of Something New, something truly different? Julliacks’s The Architecture of an Atom, is a kind of breath-taking, experimental/alternative graphic novel/film series that I am inclined to call a comics poem, as the links between images are never obvious or clear. It’s a 300+ page dream state, ten years in the making, with yes, some consistent characters all outlined at the beginning and end, and there’s a loose story line, but fasten your seat belt for a dizzying ride through color and form and experimental storytelling. It’s not easy to figure out what is going on, and is not exactly a relaxing, straightforward read, just to stae the obvious.
You even get an Atom passport when you begin the journey. And “the story begins with red, purple, the colors of organs, healthy, beating hard.” It focuses on a friendship between Frida and Cohl and a trip they make together to “a metaphysical France.” There are others they meet there and become friends with. The whole occasion feels initially youthful, like The Trip To Europe After University, though it then turns darker, a sober coming-of-age story. Drugs and alcohol would also seem to be involved, as the telling, while dreamlike, also seems hallucinatory.
Sometimes the art feels like a Paris street mural, or tagging, sometimes sketchy, but it is never boring. The colors and experimentation are often lovely, romantic. Scraps of poetry or narration float by as in Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, or Dorothy’s fall to Oz, objects appearing and disappearing: “Today we learn to breathe.” “Bring in soft noise.” France, don’t forget is a beautiful country, a place of art, and the reinvention of art, especially a metaphysical France, I suppose, but then things turn a little scary: “We are lost.” “Hunting, they are desperate.”
These are some keys Julliacks provides, once we are done with our reading:
The Architecture of an Atom is “a transmedia polyphonic science fiction love tragedy and gesammtkunstwerk whose structure is based upon that of an atom containing a feature film, a comix art book and a series of ‘infinite whistle’ performance films about the fantasies and self-created conflicts of groups.”
“The wavy time of relationships that creates their own time through patterns.”
“Note: Everyone in this story tries to speak another language playfully but with difficulty.”
Juliacks says it is “a comic book that is also a series of paintings, drawings and prints.”
Love happens, moving from like to love, from friendship to something more: “When I die, you will shoot my ashes into the water. . . and we will be one forever.”
Lost in the woods, lost in the water; there’s some loss and grief “Breathe. Gone.”
Many wordless pages, abstract, reflective paintings. Color as commentary.
The book ends with “the infinite whistle,” a tin whistle that she describes as “a syncretic psycho-magical 'placebo object, that incites, refracts and destroys the couple, shattering the whole.”
In other words, the summer relationship ends! People connect, disconnect, move on!
That whistle reminds me of ee cummings:
in Just- spring when the world is mud-luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come. running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing
Only the tune turns darker in Julliacks’s version of the poem, at childhood’s end: “The flame grew in the trees that we planted last year when Frida and Cohl” ended.
And then there is the film, which runs parallel to the comic book, which was done before the book. And also some “spin-off” short films, called Tin Whistle. Have seen one, that looks like abstract performance art, an image of a man in psychological awakening.
Is it juvenilia, tagging pages in a book vs. art? That’s your call. What becomes art is usually ridiculed in the time of its conception. Will this be part of the guide to art in the coming years? I am not an expert, but it feels new and fresh and colorful and interesting. And the alt-comics community is all in with Julliacks, so I will look into it some more.
Film teaser from Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/87274159
The 2Cloud Publishers presenting about the project:
http://2dcloud.tumblr.com/post/163676...
This is roughly ten years of work from Julliacks; here’s more about the project, worth skimming at the very least, though it seems a little overwhelming, admittedly:
http://www.archatom.org
March 7, 2018
Well this is stunning, the art is so beautiful that I can't believe this exist but I'm grateful, so much beauty and the history is pretty interesting too, sometimes can be a little much information but you always can give it a second read because it's hard sometimes to focus when you have so much beautiful things to admire. I think that all respectable personal collection has to have this book.
Read
April 25, 2018I don't know how to feel about this book. I had a love/hate relationship with it all throughout. I loved the art, especially the pages that used lots of blues and pink. I liked the rhythm of the entire book and how musical and poetic the words used were (although I did not understand them sometimes like much of the poetry coming out today). I liked the book as art I can hold and experience.
The story with Frida and Cohl and others I did not completely understand. The story with them is not sequential and the layers of their story unfold as you keep reading but I just didn't really care about the story. So the hate part of the relationship I feel like is mostly my fault. It might be my lack of patience to fully understand or "get" this book. At the end of the book Juliacks gives a sort of explanation of what she was doing. I looked up the website and the videos and I understood what she meant and I understood what she was getting at but I am still not completely satisfied.
At the end of the day, I think this book might not be for me. I'll probably keep returning it to see if I see something new with fresh eyes. I'll probably let friends borrow it to see if they understand something I don't.
The story with Frida and Cohl and others I did not completely understand. The story with them is not sequential and the layers of their story unfold as you keep reading but I just didn't really care about the story. So the hate part of the relationship I feel like is mostly my fault. It might be my lack of patience to fully understand or "get" this book. At the end of the book Juliacks gives a sort of explanation of what she was doing. I looked up the website and the videos and I understood what she meant and I understood what she was getting at but I am still not completely satisfied.
At the end of the day, I think this book might not be for me. I'll probably keep returning it to see if I see something new with fresh eyes. I'll probably let friends borrow it to see if they understand something I don't.
July 30, 2018
After reading this book and then attempting ( and failing) to conjure up a review it dawned on me that sometimes it’s just fine to be rendered speechless by a graphic novel.
I should clarify that this book is less a graphic novel in the traditional sense and more a fine art, multi disciplinary exploration. I couldn’t follow what I would call a plot because the language of the work was beyond mere words.
In the afterword it mentions that these pages were shown at galleries and this helps me see how their complexity and ferociousness can exist singularly or collected in a volume such as this.
My soundtrack for this was mostly heavy Dutch death metal and in a way it was entirely appropriate and complimentary.
Publisher 2D Cloud. Kickstarter Summer 2017
I should clarify that this book is less a graphic novel in the traditional sense and more a fine art, multi disciplinary exploration. I couldn’t follow what I would call a plot because the language of the work was beyond mere words.
In the afterword it mentions that these pages were shown at galleries and this helps me see how their complexity and ferociousness can exist singularly or collected in a volume such as this.
My soundtrack for this was mostly heavy Dutch death metal and in a way it was entirely appropriate and complimentary.
Publisher 2D Cloud. Kickstarter Summer 2017
Read
April 21, 2019i dunno what just happened but i think i just went through a wormhole.
January 18, 2018
Ambitious and at times beautiful but the overall experience of trying to actually read it was a little less than enjoyable.
Read
December 13, 2021An earnest painted comic book poem-certainly unique, but maybe too much off an odd duck to be really satisfying.
May 23, 2025
great visuals. fun book to follow along while trying to connect the dots.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews