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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/images-digital-age-something-unusual-happening-printed-matter/"></div><p>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/megan-n-liberty/">Megan N. Liberty</a></p>
<p>Fully immersed in the digital age, we are in a constant state of multitasking; we carry web browsers in our pockets, simultaneously talking, reading, and traveling. Whereas once we relegated combinations of image and text to children’s books, now they ooze from our fingertips as we spew emoji and GIFS alongside our letters. One particular media is well-suited to champion narrative that captures our new mode of interaction: the comic. Already steeped in image-text combinations, its layered multi-panel form speaks our digital language. <em>Something Unusual is Happening: Experimental Comics and the Art of Visual Narrative</em> at Printed Matter in New York surveys some of the comic artists innovating today, presenting a range of works that reflect the multitasking, fast paced, image-text communication that has become commonplace. The majority of the work is from the aughts, and includes American and European artists and stapled zines, bound books, textiles, and large prints. Shared by all is a commitment to expanding the form, pushing the limits of graphic narrative. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/images-digital-age-something-unusual-happening-printed-matter/#more-4747" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Images of the Digital Age: &#8220;Something Unusual is Happening&#8221; at Printed Matter

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

<strong>Megan N. Liberty is an arts and culture writer based in Brooklyn. She is the Art Books editor at the <em>Brooklyn Rail</em> and has a master's in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.</strong>

Megan N. Liberty

Deana Lawson’s Curtains

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa

Art &amp; Architecture

Escaping Wars and Waves

Humanizing the Headlines: On Olivier Kugler’s “Escaping Wars and Waves”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">— Fernando Pessoa, <em>The Book of Disquiet</em></p>

Around the World

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated." — Comics Code, 1954

Comics

Frail Sister

Collaging Together Scraps of Trauma: Karen Green’s “Frail Sister”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

That Was the Answer

Ray Johnson’s Kaleidoscopic Interview Practice

The Book as Technology

"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein

Science &amp; Technology

Blind Spot

The Truths We Do Not Know We Know

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Megan N. Liberty is an arts and culture writer based in Brooklyn. She is the Art Books editor at the <em>Brooklyn Rail</em> and has a master's in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.