Concrete Comics

Derik Badman, for The Comics Journal blog, reviews Mark Laliberte’s Brickbrickbrick, a book of concrete poetry made entirely from appropriations of drawings of bricks in comic books. Each page has a different style of brick, with the original author’s name functioning as the poem’s title. What’s especially interesting about Badman’s review is his unfamiliarity with the genre of concrete poetry, which forces him to approach Laliberte’s book as a work of comics. Even so, his reading is remarkably similar to the reading a poet might give:

While the images at first might look like simple appropriations without the hand of Laliberte himself, they are in fact much more of a construction than that. In a brief video interview posted by his publisher, he explains that the images are a product of copying, erasing, drawing, shifting. Laliberte has constructed his own walls from the bricks of cartoonists. Yet, those bricks still retain the stylistic markers of their original sources. And one, immediately perceivable, reading of this book is as a series showcasing, through the simple and easily overlooked brick wall, a stylistic microcosm of all those artists.

So the book function differentially - what the reader actually reads are the differences between the pages, between the stylistic choices and habits that go into drawing a brick. The poems then rest at the intersection between concrete poetry, conceptual writing, and comics. Sweet!