Creative Time Comics: A Graphic Record of the Here and Now

• The comic is a deceptively simple yet powerful communication tool. It is capable of addressing complex issues while being disseminated widely and consumed quickly. Although its basic construction has remained relatively unchanged for over a century, the comic's popularity and effectiveness persist, and it has seen a growing interest in recent years within the art world. Those who make comics now hail from a variety of disciplines, not just cartooning and illustration, and use the medium to sketch out ideas or voice concerns in parallel with the rest of their practice. At the same time, comics have expanded beyond narrow associations with superheroes and "the funnies" to become a vibrantly diverse and decisively contemporary mode for expressing ideas. As a form that thrives in systems of mass reproduction and circulation, the comic has also made the jump from newsprint to new media. Many of the comics being created today—whether they are an artist's primary focus or more of an experiment—are showcased and shared online.
  
  In recognition of comics' resurgence in our visual culture, particularly via the web, we started Creative Time Comics in January 2009. Every month thereafter, for two years, Creative Time invited an artist to produce a comic that would be featured on a dedicated website. Each of the twenty-four artists was asked to address a timely issue, large or small, that was in the news, on their mind, or otherwise affecting their world. Homelessness, genetically modified foods, climate change and pollution, the Gulf oil spill, and incarceration all surface in the series. Other comics look at parenthood, evolution, death and loss, cultural appropriation, consumer culture, cartoon violence, conspiracies, and the post-recession American landscape. Still others reflexively explore the language and history of comics themselves.
  
  All of these rather difficult ideas are tackled through the economical means of words and pictures in juxtaposition. These juxtapositions are vehicles not only for concise and poignant observations, but also a certain brand of humor that emerges through the incongruous linkage of thorny content and crude drawings, or depressing realities rendered with an absurd, Disney-like innocence. The comics in this series show us that we can be concerned and amused at the same time, and that a great deal can be said through just a single image or a succession of frames. Together, the comics constitute a chronology, an archive, and a month-by-month portrait of the zeitgeist. And they demonstrate that what we deem important and worth remembering—as well as how it is depicted—is always a matter of perspective.
  
  At the outset of the series, the goal was simply to merge timely social critique with the medium of comics. To provide some formal consistency, each artist was asked to start with a basic, three-by-three panel grid. New additions to the series were then presented online, increasing the speed and range of the works' dispersal and allowing the comics to be published a mere week or two after they were created, in turn accentuating their spontaneity and urgency. The series was also designed to smudge the line between artists who primarily participate in the world of comics and those trained, active, or recognized mainly in the field of contemporary art. Some of them, in fact, have carved out a territory between these spheres where the traditional definitions of "comic art" and "contemporary art" start to break down. Figures such as R. Crumb and Raymond Pettibon have expertly traversed this divide, while the growing art world interest in comics has manifested in the form of major comic-themed exhibitions across the country. Many of these shows have focused on a particular artist or examined comics as an identifiable style, history, or sub-genre. By contrast, Creative Time Comics explores the comic as an active process—one that can be used deftly and immediately to exercise free speech, record history, identify and think through challenges, and simultaneously provoke and entertain.
  
  With these aims in mind, we invited twenty-four artists to come to the drafting table and contribute windows into the world—a world that is at times both strangely alien and starkly recognizable as our own. The hope is that each comic allows us to see the world slightly differently than we otherwise would, as if one were trying on a new pair of glasses each month. Many of the comics depict a world that is changing, or on the verge of change, or in need of change—both on a global scale and a deeply personal one, and often filtered through the lenses of fantasy, autobiography, abstraction, and, of course, comedy. When considered as a whole, the series is far from a consistent and objective representation of our recent past. Rather, this is an uneven record, one that jumps around in style and subject matter, foregoing a coherent point of view in favor of a fractured one that shifts from month to month, artist to artist, and sometimes even panel to panel. Two years later, we can look back to find an odd kind of clarity in this accumulation of difference. This is not a linear history, but a graphic one.
  
  —Shane Brennan, Curator of Creative Time Comics