Vancouver show spans pop art from Krazy Kat to Spore

It may seemKrazy, but the Vancouver Art Gallery is devoting a major show that opens Saturday to comic books, animation and video games.

Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art is the name of an ambitious new exhibition that focuses on the skill and innovation needed to create these popular art forms.

Curator Bruce Grenville told CBC News it may look like pop culture, but it's most definitely art.

"This is definitely part of a large field of visual culture that surrounds us and we're engaged with hundreds and hundreds of times every day. And all the artists here that sense of awareness of the history that they're participating in is very strong in their work and they really push that forward," he said.

Grenvilleselected experts in the fields of animation, video games and Japanese manga and anime tochoose the best work in their fields.

"In the field of comics, we asked Art Spiegelman and Seth to select the artists that established the genre, the artists that created its mature form and the artists who are pointing the way toward the future," Grenville said.

Spiegelman, who worked for The New Yorker and Harper's, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his graphic novel Maus. Seth is a Canadian comic artist who drew Palookaville and created a graphic novel for the New York Times.

An amphitheatre filled with high and low desks pays tribute to the progress of the graphic novel from the 1930s to the present and includes work from artist Shaun Tan's acclaimed wordless graphic novel The Arrival.

It took three years to gather all the works for the exhibit, which covers 20,000 square feet on two floors.

The earliest work,George Herriman's Krazy Kat, is almost 100 years old.

The most recent is a new video game called Spore from EA Games that won't be out until fall.

There are Disney storyboards, pages from graphic novels and non-stop screeningsof Japanese anime.

Anime is an immense field of distinctive animated cartoons, while manga is stories in print form, Grenville explained.

"It's a massive industry with a tremendous history that parallels the Western one but with an entirely different set of goals and values," he said.

"The animation is outstanding and it has a depth and compositional feel of someone working from many different perspectives."

While children might enjoy the exhibit, it's actually a sophisticated examination of all these art forms, Grenville said.

"It's not a kids show.The language is complicated.The visuals are complicated.The characters themselves and who they constitute are complicated.It's not just for children, but it doesn't mean children are excluded from it, either.It means they need to be brought to it," he said.

Krazy opens Saturday at Vancouver Art Gallery and runs until Sept. 7. The exhibition will travel to New York after the Vancouver show.