Gloria Glitzer's periodical "About Series" features a different artist in each issue. She started the publication in 2010 and views it as a mobile exhibition space in which she invites "...an individual or a group of people to develop a work or exhibition exclusively for this space."(1) The format for each issue is the same with a minimal leporello structure of 4 pages accompanied with a small Riso printed pamphlet stitched into the last fold and finally a sticker on the front cover displaying the title and issue number.
This issue features the work of Alexis Beauclair, a well respected French artist whose drawings, comics and illustrations have been published in such venerable places as the New York Times, New Yorker and Bloomberg Businessweek. In 2012, he co-founded with Bettina Henni, a press called Riso Papier Machine [Papier Machine | People of Print] through which he also publishes his own drawing zines and mini comics. With this issue of "About Series" he uses a minimalist aesthetic to interrogate the nature of reading and what constitutes a comic, and by making it nonverbal leaves it to the reader to fill out that space while questioning the basic tenets of what we traditionally understand comics to comprised of. Beauclair's work would seem to fit squarely within the new artistic movement called "French Abstract Formalist Comics" that first emerged in France during the 2010's.
Someone who has written extensively about this movement is the comics critic Kim Jooha, and here she outlines some of its essential features and their effect upon the reader, writing "The emotionless and mechanical style and lack of narrative and words lead the reader to focus on the formal qualities and abstract concepts of comics, visual art, and printed media, such as space-time, movement, body, sign, texture, representation, transformation, repetition/difference, etc..."(2) She continues writing that "In the mid-2010s, a group of French artists began creating wordless comics with geometric and minimalist style and little or no narrative. What they show instead is more of a 'process.'"(3) Beauclair's work would seem to illustrate all of these themes and once these parameters are understood the work doesn't seem quite so impenetrable!
For some other artists in this blog working in a similar manner check out: Nicolas Nadé, Sammy Stein, Laurence Lagier and Editions Matière.
4 single-sided pages, individually 11.75" x 8.25" and unfolded 2ft 9"
Footnotes
1. Source: gloriaglitzer.de/about-series, accessed 12.12.2025
2. Jooha, Kim, "French Abstract Comics (French Structural Comics): An Artistic Movement," The Comics Journal, November 8, 2018. French Abstract Formalist Comics (French Structural Comics): An Artistic Movement - The Comics Journal
3. Ibid.
back cover
