ART

Comic book artist shows off full-size work

By Joey Seiler
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, November 13, 2008

Much of David Mack's artistic style comes by way of his stories.

Mack writes and illustrates "Kabuki," a comic book following the eponymous young girl through the machinations of secret corporations, assassin squads, and the Yakuza. For all the action trappings, though, "Kabuki" is often slow and contemplative, more focused on internal conflict than swapping punches - or katanas. The mixed themes are nowhere more evident than in Mack's illustrations, combining traditional pen and paper work with collages of magazine art, painting, and more.

"It's just problem solving for me. I never really start with the visuals in mind," Mack says. "I start with several drafts of the script - the story is the king of the process - and I'll just go through trial and error to find the best mixture of things and often it turns into a variety of media to solve my problem of fitting the most information in the best way to a page."

In a new show opening Friday at St. Edward's University Art Gallery, Mack is showing off the work from his latest collection of "Kabuki" stories, "The Alchemy." The individual issues of comics will be collected into a hard-bound volume in December, but now visitors can see them as originally assembled by Mack in full size.

"It'll be the same story, but it's going to be quite a different experience. There's a lot of 3-D, and you can see the paint and collage and things taped together, and that adds a different element to that experience," Mack says. "You'll get a lot of different texture - you know it prints reasonably well, but I always like the originals better."

That's not to shy away from his printed work, though. Aside from the fact that bound comics helped Mack make his name, both with his own "Kabuki" and on Marvel works such as "Daredevil" and "Alias," the medium holds its own appeal.

While almost all art asks its audience to react, reconsider, and engage with what the artist is trying to achieve, comics, especially to Mack, require an audience to piece events together. While one panel might show a basketball on a table and another shows it on the floor next to the table, only the reader can infer what happened.

Mack grants that seeing his images on the wall is different from flipping through them in a book, but this is still a gallery that's there as much to be read as it is browsed.

"The wonderful thing about comics is that the magic isn't in the panels. The magic is when the reader puts it together and tells this story in their head," Mack says. "To be honest, I don't think of any of the imagery I'm sending in (to St. Edward's) as the art. The art happens when someone reads the story and constructs the story. Someone can find something visually amusing, but it's when they merge their thought process with it that the art happens. The art of it isn't a noun. It's a verb, an action."

'The Alchemy' by artist David Mack opens Friday . 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays through Dec. 10. Gallery talk 5 p.m. and opening reception 6 to 8 p.m. Friday. Arts Building, St. Edward's University, 3001 S. Congress Ave. www.stedwards.edu/hum/art/student/index.html.