“comics”

Sexy Loners^WP is (or rather, was, it just closed this March) one fetishy, weird, morbid, scabrous, bizarre, twisted, risqué, potentially-offensive webcomic (really, so don’t click ahead and complain about it!) with subtitles to match (Story of my life… got the right girl, got the wrong sexual fetish—I jerked myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the stain, the only thing that’s real.—Sometimes I think God hates me, but then I remember that it’s probably because I do strips like this one.—When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers—The biggest threat to otakus is natural selection.—If I really knew a surefire way of getting laid, do you think I would have time to write a strip about it?). It also has the best interface I’ve seen for a webcomic and got me excited all over again at the possibilities of a wikicriticism (see The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai or Video Girl Etchi I to see how much the commentary adds to the strips).

“I have this great illusion of dying exhausted rather than bored” has become of late something like Andrea’s personal slogan. I love the phrase—wrapped in downbeat words, it’s a souvenir of our own mortality that still manages to resolve in cheerful (maudlin) upbeatness—and so I thought it was time for a personal logo too. This came out after some fiddling and I quite like it, if I say so myself. (You will notice I’m still deep in my Bembo phase.) Tomorrow we’ll see if Andrea likes it.

The girl’s Sandman’s Death, which adds a nice layer of meaning (and copyright infringement for good measure) to the logo.

I loved the above composition. Perhaps it’s just that I took Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics^WP epiphany too seriously, but I feel there’s something deep about it. Space and time are one, do you see? The three small panels on top convey a quick sequence (and I can’t help but hear a zippo clicking open and the smallest of sighs), while the long panel invites us to rest on her at leisure. And we can go back, turn back time and see it all over again. Or stop it altogether and focus on the third panel with its bright flame. Or we can go backwards, make it into an infinitely regressive spiral. Or we can try and take it all in one visual gulp. Present is where you are. And all it takes is looking.

Space is time’s ultimate interface.

There’s also another superb quick-closeup, similar in structure, in Animatrix^WP ’s Final Flight of the Osiris^WP. It’s more joltingly impactful, to be sure, but that’s also its greatest shortcoming: it’s gone before you notice it. Our interfaces have evolved and our media player can let us see it slowly, frame by frame, but we can’t readily choose our frame. We can’t try and take it all and dream of synchronicity. That is, we can’t unless we space the frames.

Via Adolfo, who seems to be reading good stuff lately.

I just finished reading Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Put simply, I’m floored. They were both deep, beautiful books, and, particularly interesting for me, both were superb criticisms (of, respectively, information design and comics). They both self-consciously embarked on the hard task of developing taste, of teaching how to see.

My current appreciation (read infatuation) of criticism has been long coming but perhaps inevitable. As far as I can now grok, there are two and only two genres of education: education in skill and education in taste. Every other truly educational book is a critique.

School would do well to acknowledge this. Skill is how to do, criticism is how to see. Both are pointless without one another and a great mistake of modern education is to concern itself only with the former. It doesn’t generally think of pupils as criticism-capable, which is bollocks, and, much more harmfully still, it perverts criticism by trying to cast it as a skill. That’s how you get to rote equation solving or sickening memorization of periods of literature and its important figures.

There have been many boy-is-this-comic-good moments amid my reading of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman^WP: the convention of serial killers (with panels, keynote speakers, chit chat—the whole shebang); the 100-year meetings of Dream and Hob (a mortal who simply doesn’t believe in death; “death’s a mug’s game” were his words); the utterly disturbing cafeteria slaughter; the prisoner muse Calliope (to draw inspiration from her, one has to, “naturally”, rape her)... but the very first one was Dream’s stand-up-comedy-esque fight in hell for his helmet:

Today’s reading, The Perry Bible Fellowship^WP, has precious few words in it, it’s a comic strip. The most disturbed and weird one I know, at times insanely funny and original. There are over 163 strips in the archive so to make this into my Today’s Reading section (which is all about pithiness) here’s a selection of my favorites:

1. Bunny Pit
2. No Survivors
3. Sun Love
4. Raft Friends
5. Trampoline
6. Barbara and Rudy
7. Hammer Screwed
8. Not Today Little One
9. Small Man
10. New Specs for Ken
11. Billy Bunny
12. Reset
13. Suicide Train
14. Painter Piece
15. Monkey Photographer
16. Gopher Girlfriend
17. Today is my Birthday
18. Left Brain, Right Brain
19. Walbert
20. Love Lizard
21. Bumble Buzzin
22. Way too much
23. Durab, Inc
24. Food Fight

Their (brilliant) author is Nicholas Gurewitch, who also happens to be a very talented artist and movie director (The Forest (Parental Advisory: It revolves around the weirdest cartoon hand-job), Ken’s New Specs).