CF, February 21st, 2023

The 353rd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023 at 7pm ET. ONLINE PRESENTATION VIA ZOOM. Please email comicssymposium@gmail.com to register for this event. Free and open to the public.

CF on Clean Sweep – Self-Destructive Scroll Continuum

“Scrolling” has become a dominant mode of interacting with media. When something is posted to the internet it is hard to remove. It has the implication of ephemera but in fact is “carved in silicon”.

When comic strips are printed on a strip of receipt paper, the images are degraded by the printer, and the paper slowly self destructs and falls apart over a decade. Scrolls are one of the first portable document formats, with a kind of built-in privacy feature. The images are hidden inside until you get to them, no flipping through in the bookstore.

Comics are typically printed on a page wherein we may see a bit of what’s coming, and flipping pages with eye movement from the bottom to the top creates an implicit rhythm of its own. In the scroll, the rhythm becomes a continuum determined only by panel shapes and the spaces between them.

CF is based in NY. He has exhibited internationally and published with Picturebox, Anthology Editions, Mania Press, and Landfill Editions among others. Forthcoming books include a collection of early work from NYRB and a book for Breakdown press. “Clean Sweep” is a series of scrolls by different artists printed on receipt paper. He self publishes a monthly one-sheet “Causeway” available through Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/333cf). In addition to drawing, he makes lamps from metal, acrylic, and folded paper, as well as electronic instruments from scratch that are used in solo sound project “Universal Cell Unlock”

CF's scroll comics can be purchased here:

https://333cf.org