Out of Picture Volume One
By Various
Villard Books

Often times the most bold and innovative works are those that are born of artists operating outside the confines of a medium. The term ‘outsider art’ is bandied about fairly regularly, but has largely come to be defined as work produced by artists with no formal training and a severe mental handicap—or some other debilitating factor that has left them on the fringes of ‘normal society.’

By that definition, the work contained in Out of Picture can hardly be considered outsider art. The artists featured in this first volume are, by and large, industry professionals who have carved out livings for themselves in the worlds of children’s books, animation, and other graphic fields. Considering that formal training in comics is a relatively new phenomenon—not to mention the fact that sequential art has never been recognized as an especially lucrative field—the concept of comic artists making their livings via tangentially related graphic fields is hardly surprising.

However, the artists on display in Out of Picture are certainly not comics artists making ends meet via graphical day jobs. Rather, these are professionals whose sequential experience has largely been limited to storyboarding. That they should try their hand at creating comics is an idea that falls well in-line with the driving factor of outsider art: those who have less invested in the unwritten rules of a medium are far more likely to bend and break them. Innovation is largely the product of such willingness, whether conscious or not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two rules of the medium largely under attack in the work displayed in this volume are a traditional adherence to paneling and dialog. Many of the artist contained in Out of Picture offer fresh takes on these commonly accepted factors, sometimes doing away with them altogether, with work that effectively blurs the line between sequential art and products of fields like children’s books and traditional paintings. The largely unique interpretations of the medium should affect artists and comics fans alike as they argue diverse interpretations about what comics are and can be.

There’s certainly value in the experiments on display here, but simply put, the book would hardly be as effective a starting point for debate, were the artists on display not all uniquely talented in their styles. Fortunately, Out of Picture is an absolutely stunning collection of work, from start to finish, displaying a diverse and gorgeous array of coffee table fodder rivaled only by the consistently wonderful output of the folks at Flight.

–Brian Heater