Abstract comics and the decomposition of horror
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent rise of abstract comics raises the problem of how horror can be conveyed in a purely non-representational mode. This article compares the strategies for evoking horror employed by three abstract comics. The shapes of Henrik Rehr’s Reykjavik simultaneously evoke a threatening geological exterior and an equally threatening interior, accelerating from horror into terror. To make The Panic, Andrei Molotiu resorted to a lengthy technical process out of which ambiguous forms emerged spontaneously; this Rorschach-like effect becomes part of the horror of his comic. Alexey Sokolin’s Life, Interwoven layers dozens of drawings in a steady progression of crowdedness and darkening, again moving from horror to terror. In all three comics the very obscurity of these abstract images contributes to their emotional impact.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it