Exhibiting Illustrated Subterranean Stories Featuring NYC’s Subway

New York’s rich visual vernacular is a colorful setting for illustrated stories, so it comes as no surprise that the iconic transportation system plays a starring role in comics and graphic novels. Drawing on satirical cartoons, comic strips and comic books from the 19th through the 21st centuries, Underground Heroes: New York Transit in Comics is raucous ride through New York’s transit system from a range of visual storytellers.

koolgirlposse’s concept behind the exhibition design was to make the viewer feel as if they were walking into a life-sized comic book, using the visual language of medium: the comic cover as an intro panel, enlarged benday dots in process colors as a backdrop to unify the exhibition space, black bordered cases to contain physical comic book artifacts, section intro panels with titles framed in energetic shapes, and speech bubble shaped object id’s.

Soft banners featuring oversized comic book covers interspersed between sections create textural difference between graphics.

Subway sound effects were extracted from comic books and enlarged for emotive emphasis.