New Eternals no. 1 p. 44, 2001

More from my CAA talk. Here I was trying to get at what, to me, makes pieces of original art compelling, despite their incompleteness: "in the case of comic-book art, the incidents depicted in the particular piece of original art are usually wrested out of a larger narrative continuum. This situation, by de-emphasizing the overall plot, not only places more emphasis on the visual treatment, but also creates a sense of mystery as to the specific events portrayed, which is satisfying in its own way since it avoids the simple consummability, and therefore disposability, of a plot. (I am showing you a page from the 2001 DC comics “The New Eternals,” penciled by Joe Bennet and inked by Scott Hanna, which also is missing any balloons or sound effects—these being added these days digitally, in post production. I can assure you that as a work of art it is in all ways superior to the printed product—which had a muddled, incomprehensible storyline and laughable characters. As a sheer drawing, however, we can appreciate not just the energy of the composition, but the visual parallels and continuities Bennet draws between the panels, integrating the individual images into the visual field of the page as a whole). To a large extent, it may be that our ability to appreciate such fragmentariness as a positive aesthetic quality has developed out of Pop art, and especially out of Roy Lichtenstein’s technique of isolating, blowing up, and exhibiting in gallery situations single panels—an instance of the little studied influence of Pop art on comics, rather than the other way around. More generally, however, it also seems to me to satisfy what we may call a certain modernist appreciation of incompleteness, at a time when the mainstream, as well as most of what we might call “alternative” culture, is as enthralled to notions of plot and narrative closure as any minor nineteenth century novelist."