My chickens have come home to roost.

My chickens have come home to roost.

This isn't off topic.

Following on my from last comments on comic making, I've had the opportunity to explore my POV more actively at the coal face.

I'm now composing another series of strips on my experience with Fibromyalgia.

This autobiographical exercise is  engineered under the influence of American Splendor but without Harvey Pekar et al's street level realism. 

ASIDE: American Splendor offers a very mundane take on the world. It's day to day narrative existence is held in place by  a superb ear for dialogue and considered narrator's voice interventions. That's its strength -- says I , as I work my way through all of the comics in the series.

Go to archive: Fibromyalgia for Beginners

I don't know where my work actually locates itself in way of its form. It reminds me of a monologue ( as in a stand-up narrative) driven by a mishmash of 'offers'/suggestions from graphic items that help drive the story line.

If I was drawing the thing I'd fill each panel with intended art, line by line. I'd have to start composing each panel with a completed image in mind.

It would be rather conventional, by default...and it would take me much longer to create each strip.

But since I'm doing this with photomontage, each panel comes together via found graphics and every time I find an item its further manipulation  is an unknown option until I start fiddling. So the process is layered by this pulling in of mixed elements and aggregating. The photos I take, hold the mix together  and hopefully consolidate the narrative.

What I am doing I actually began doing way back when I was an adolescent. I used to make cartoonish drawings to illustrate science projects and history lessons. I later kept scrap books where I pasted magazine and newspaper cuttings  in the form of collage.

I even collected, cut and pasted a few years of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip...

Over the years I've designed and laid out many political leaflets so I got to  fiddle with images  especially found ones. More recently I've paid my dues as a web page designer...

I've also been a dedicated follower of DADAism and am an aficionado of the cultural explosion during the Weimar Republic (Germany before Hitler).  Think: montage.

So everything I know, everything I've learnt, is coming together in this effort. And that's besides the theatre -- street theatre, cabaret, puppetry, mask making and performance -- background I also rely on as a toolkit.

Why I should contemplate the question of whether anyone else is doing this, I don't know. It has to be rather eccentric...

But hey, I keep looking for like stuff. Nonetheless, my great inspiration is the political cartoons of Mr Fish. I would look at his cartoons and say, "Wow! What a great way to comment!" He uses a lot of self evident montage elements in his work. The Fish got me thinking....what if?

All my chickens have come home to roost.

How good it is, in terms of other peoples' endorsement, is not something that concerns me at all. It certainly appeals to me and I get one helluva kick out of doing this.

That's enough.

Since I began, only in July, I have created almost 50 comic strips although I began without any of my current montage-ing skills and preferences. Now my routine and learning curve are consolidating.

Some panels, in my estimation, are impressive  -- ie: by my standards of what I want or like.

The other interesting feature of this process is the logic of the 'one home', the one comic strip of a set size. The template forces me to actively try to bend the form in order to go where I want to take it. While the formula has its limits and imposes a certain discipline  I am surprized how far I can push this as I learn the graphic language.

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Tag Team politics in the Land Downunder

Tag Team politics in the Land Downunder

Click on comic image for enlarged view

Here's a meditation on electoral politics as a puppet show with  Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott standing in for Punch and Judy. It seems so real despite the jest. Maybe there is a series in it? A horror comic

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Verfremdungseffekt: Mr Punch and the Moslems

Verfremdungseffekt: Mr Punch and the Moslems

Click on comic image for enlarged view

While I'm still experimenting I am trying to tackle more political themes in my webcomic  -- Mr Punch and Prof Rabaggy [Emeritus]. It isn't an easy challenge to explore but I suspect perseverance will win out.

The best thing about this exercise is that I get to manipulate in montage mode and the interfaces I  improvise are exciting to work with. A little bit of snip here and there, some copy and paste, then resizing and positioning....

It's learning a language while making up your own syntax. That I can work 'quickly' with the tools I choose to use means that I am not handicapped by  pretension. There is no best-of-all-possible images -- just the flotsam I can harvest, usually from online searches.

…An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts. …Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. — Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1981)

Years ago I read Ways of Seeing and this essay by the Marxist cultural critic, John Berger , changed my view of 'art' completely. Of course Berger draws a lot on my other fav, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 

Montage for me is the marriage of many of the possibilities flagged by Berger and Benjamin. If what we call 'art' is so readily reproduced in the digital age and shared, consciously remaking culture by recycling snippets of what is already available is  truer of our aesthetic production than we  are willing to own up to.

The other element of this I appreciate is that it locates dialogue up front and centre so that discourse gets to play out by following its own dialectical logic.

My theatre backgrund of course rules my preferences but while I'm a dedicated Brechtian I am also influenced by the perspective advocated by Keith Johnstone in regard to the process of improvisation.

“You ask me where I get my ideas? That I can’t say with any certainty. They come unbidden, directly, I could grasp them with my hands.” 

This may seem a contradictory convergence  -- although 'contradiction' is the driving force of all stuff.  When you start throwing all this  into the same pot with Dada and Constructivism..and Marxism, it has its own sweet logic. 

To me, anyway.

At least that's what I thought -- but I could never quite get my own creative juices in sync with the prospects that seem to be on offer. But when I realized the power of  comics and how comics could be created via montage methods, well, all my Christmases had come at once. 

No need to learn lines or perform. No onerous setting of the scene. No strict narrative form. No arty delusions hiding the tools used. Being both active in the panels  as performer and creator -- while   outside the process and  distanced in the Brecht sense. 

 Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect")

Self evident engagement where the value of the end result is greater than the sum of its many disparate parts.

It was also a bit of shock when I recognized that I could be 'me' (sort of) as though I was  a player in my own repertory company and co-star of my own show. (I thank the example of Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco -- and the autobiographical comics genre -- for that option.)

I could also get this 'me' to work  my own preferred  hours and do all my bidding.

Since I have a commedia dell'arte background (sort of) the logic is sweet: cartoonery characterizations performing skits (albeit in panels on a web page) in empty black space calling up anything -- any tool -- that takes their fancy.

If you do your homework on the theory of montage  you'll perhaps see the possibilities.

What I get is this great synthesis to play with and explore. But the irony is that unless you have done Improv and fiddled with photomontage you may miss the argument I'm trying to make. This isn't about the digital powers of Photoshop (which I do not use) because  I'm not striving to reproduce reality seamlessly by manipulating images to pretend that they are original or arty. It's more snip 'em and slap  'em together rather than anything else. Discordance rules and has to be seen to rule.

It's like a digital pin board and John Berger said this about them.

“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”- Ways of Seeing, John Berger

But then I could go on and on and maybe discuss Merz but then, that would be like opening up a can of worms...

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Ideology Webcomic

Ideology Webcomic

Click on comic image for enlarged view

I won't be posting all of my webcomics here but I will share the ones that have a relevant topic. My hope is to do more 'political' ones like this and slowly move into more frequent editorialising. 'Tis all a matter of practice and experimentation. While I am in transit to a new domain, the webcomic series --  Mr Punch and Prof Ratbaggy [Emeritus] -- lives here.

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Montage a go go

Montage a go go

Montage by Philippe Jusforgues

So there's me, right, playing around with my snip and paste trying to make comics -- montage comics -- when I  thought I'd go Google a bit.

"Montage"

So I come upon this simply great site -- collageart.org -- which is a sort of montagee's wet dream.

resources. resources. 

So you don't have to go back to Russia and Constructivism or wallow in cultural edginess of the Weimar Republic. You can  get your  fresh produce montage fix online any day... 

The galleries linked to by collageart.org - are all fantastic examples of the magic...and I now feel not so alone as I did. Montage like this may seem, in the light of the whiz bang of Photoshoppery, all very old hat, but the  real clincher for the form is the  ready merging of contradictory elements. It's scrapbooking of whatever takes your fancy because digital is at home with its kind.

It's not a "Sur-real(ity)" because  it is very much closer to DADA and Constructivism. Nor is it essentially sentenced to what may have once been printed.

It's like Rap/Hip Hop -- sampling stuff to make new stuff. But the thing I appreciate is that with this sort of montage -- esp much photomontage --   the means used is self evident.

And here's a surprize: my own work is going to be linked to from collageart.org.

From my recent webcomic.

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Girt by Sea (webcomic completed)

Girt by Sea (webcomic completed)

I've finally completed the conversion of Girt By Sea into a web comic. It now lives online here .

The exercise was challenging but it pushed me to explore a range of  different approaches in order to tell it the way I'd hoped. While the sequential imagery was handicapped because of its genesis as a sound play, I nonetheless discovered a range of montage techniques which  made the project exciting to pursue.

My comicifying confidence has risen sharply. I may be creating photo comics but I'm also handling my materials as  photo montage. 

It's like all my Christmases have come at once.I've been absolutely smitten by the work of  John Heartfield and co(history of photomontage) for decades and now I'm developing the photo manipulation  techniques that may enable me to do in like mode. I also suffer from a groupie obsession with the collages of Kurt Schwitters...

The results may look 'messy' but if it looks like the graffiti wall at the local railway station, that's they way I like it.  

Girt By Sea from Ratbag Media


Afterward:

So now the world is my oyster.  In pursuit of  inspiration I watched the film, American Splendor tonight (again) which is about Harvey Pekar's contributions to the genre of non fiction biographical comics -- American Splendor being a comic series about his own mundane existence.  That he started writing comics initially by working with Robert Crumb  is a tad disconcerting as I have never ever been a Crumb fan, despite my 60s background  and  my penchant back then for Underground Comix.

But my mental cogs are whirling...big time.

I suggested today, semi publicly, that my next 'political' project could be a webcomic about the Northern Territory Intervention.  I also suspect that I can comicify my long held intention to generate a sort of Fibomyalgia Survival Manual, drawing on my own, everyday, experience of the condition.

In the meantime Punch and Prof will keep me working at the coal face  and I'll use that to see how far I can push the boundaries and explore my creative options. 

I think I am onto something -- a limited toolbox it may be but there is enough there to sustain a few projects, if I keep working on my photomontagery, my graphic editing skills and my  photography.

I'm thinking I'd really appreciate a IPad #2 with a PhotoBooth ap so that what I do on my desktop I can do out and about.  That way I can look at the image  of myself plus what or who ever while I'm shooting it.  For now I need to explore and master the  skills for  composing photoes (with me in them) using my camera's self timer.

Another option may be to use my cheap pocket video camera set to still mode ...

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'Footnotes on Gaza ' --these people have no other choice but to resist otherwise they loose all.

'Footnotes on Gaza ' --these people have no other choice but to resist otherwise they loose all.

Rarely -- so very rarely -- do you read something that changes your perspective on the world. While I've been a long term supporter of the Palestinian cause these past 40+ years , what Joe Sacco does in Footnotes on Gaza  is confront me with the brutal front line reality -- rather than serve up what so often can be  an abstraction or simply 'another news item'.

You want to understand Gaza? You want to fathom why Zionism is a racist doctrine and why Israel is a colonial settler state? Then start here with Joe Sacco's Footnotes on Gaza.

Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah—cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake—reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheikhs, 

The Palestinians have no other choice but to resist  by any means necessary.  You want to challenge that? Then go read Sacco.

No choice.

The world over what happens in Palestine follows the same game plan that all colonial settler states have used to displace and destroy indigenous populations.

The word 'genocide' is a relevant usage. So too is 'state terrorism' against a whole population....

While Sacco's focus is to investigate and record the details of a massacre -- the graphic storyline keeps shifting between the now  of 2003 -- and the then, almost 50 years previously. So the tangible reality of Gaza -- of how a disenfranchised and brutalized population is terrorized and cooped up  is explored in almost 400 pages of superb line drawings.

In this  concentration camp -- and thats' what Gaza is -- Sacco enlists the voices of those who have been sentenced to struggle day in  day out, over years and decades   because they have committed the insufferable crime of being Palestinian -- born on land the thieves want (and have already taken).

Footnotes on Gaza is indeed just a footnote to all that. Just another dirty incident in a long war. 

But here, the intimacy of the record is almost unbearably poignant.

Loss...and survival.

There are few voices of protest that can match the articulation rendered here in ink. For a 'comic' this is another level all together. I think it serves the story telling better than straight  journalism because it is so dense and the episodes so rewarding...and so human.

The voices rule the story. All the so many  of them. 

You can hear the voices as though you are listening to Sacco's tape recorder -- You too are in the room, in the Gaza streets....amongst all that living pain and suffering...and the overriding imperative that these people have no other choice but to resist otherwise they loose all.

Edward Said, the renowned literary scholar and Palestinian rights spokesman, wrote in his foreword to Palestine (an earlier work by Sacco): "With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco."

An Interview with Joe Sacco

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Graphic Update

Graphic Update

Since I have now begun my adaption of Girt By Sea into a comic I am daunted by the possibility that the finished graphic product may run to more than 15 pages.

While for a comic it is  a tad over written -- wordy -- I am surprized how the material bends to cartoonish mode.

Words and story are maleable.

As I work through this exercise the challenge is either gonna make or break me.

I'm doing it via improvising as I go so the consequent melange  is sure to be  interesting.

The irony is that I suspect 'my style' is  rather quickly developing. How would I describe it? 'Stylized graffiti'  may suit. Why it may seem that the form is similar to  Terry Gilliam's Monty Python graphics, I reckon that's far too 'neat' for me. If I cut out, I'm keen that you can see the scissor line. My cut outs are gonna be rough cut outs. My panels are not gonna be pretend real or pseudo animation

Black board scribbles without chalk.  Everything that fits between the panel walls.

I'm working from/with a 12-panel template with a standard size for each panel. That formats the story telling.

Black background -- a sort of black light theatre approach -- with subdued tones generally, but offset by occasional strong colours, especially red.

Being a webcomic I think the blackness suits the platform.

What I'm seeing when I browse my output is my years of cabaret, street theatre, mask performance and puppetry spewing over 'the page' -- albeit the web page.

Another element I had in mind was a puppet video web series  project I was enamoured with a few years back -- The Rag Show. The two puppeteers -- Tim Lagasse and Jim Napolitano --used a lot of cut out figures to present their short, often political,skits.

..and the Erwin Piscator production of The Good Soldier Schweik produced in 1928 Berlin. The original cartoons in the original Czech satirical novel were tuned into life size figue cut outs in similar mode to what John Heartfield did here:

These theatrical references may seem weird but then, I make this stuff come together by 'performing' for the camera. I shoot myself with puppets in colour pencil style and then integrate the photographs into the comic panels.

Too easy. 

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Comic-ifying... anything

Comic-ifying... anything

Louis Proyect has an interesting post today about his encounters with Harvey Pekar's widow. over his 'memoir comic'. 

Ouch!

The biopic comic in question would have made a great read.  It just goes to show you what you can do  drawing pictures with word embeds.

But I digress...

I've been pondering my options for the long festering radio play of mine -- Girt By Sea. 

I was thinking of turning it into a web comic but the challenge was, how? Since I am enamoured with Shakespeare's  A Mid Summer Night's Dream  it suddenly dawned on my that I could utilize the Mechanicals device.

A mechanical is any of six characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who perform the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe. Named for their occupations as skilled manual laborers, they are a group of Amateur (mostly incompetent) actors from around Athens, looking to make names for themselves by having their production chosen among several acts as the courtly entertainment for the royal wedding party of Theseus and Hippolyta.

I'm thinkin that I get my Punch characters -- my Professor Ratbaggy's Red Cordial Show crew -- to perform Girt By Sea in comic format. 

So Mr Punch and Professor Ratbaggy (Emeritus) will -- well, maybe --  have a Girt By Sea episode using the ensemble to play the parts.

So with that in mind I will  re-work the script....

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Comic and montage as a means to a medium

Comic and montage as a means to a medium

'Tis a wonderful moment when you work at something and it begins to come together, almost by itself.

Well this is me and my Mr Punch project. 

Coming together.

The elements are complicated.

First there is the drama, the story telling business, driven, as it happens, by character attribute and pre-existing use. I may parody puppetry but in the pitch there is more to mine than I at first thought.

Then there is the photography -- posing the subjects to get the best shot in the lighting conditions I'm working under.

Finally, comes the task of pulling the comic together panel by panel before  publishing online.

While I started with 'a' concept, I am surprised how much I can veer toward utilizing a mix of elements in creating the comic. Since I've gone back to using colour  there is no reason I cannot indulge myself  with collage and montage effects so long as the reading flows.

Reading so many graphic novels and comics of late I get to respect the inventiveness of both illustrators and writers. I am also exposed to how fluid and flexible the medium is.  

From what any one considers to be comics on paper -- new options have been developed such as the extraordinarily effective comic journalism -- especially Joe Sacco's wonderful graphic novels  on Palestine.

Joe Sacco: Palestine

Cartoons we presume we know about --  but to take actual events and turn them into comics allows  a certain engineering of perspective to be bought into being which is going to be different from straight written journalism or standard video about these same incidents.

Looking at what the comic journalists have to say -- especially Dan Archer  and  Sacco (see interview), of course -- and then reading the end product, what strikes me is how effective are their efforts. 

For me, this is a 'wow!' moment. 

After years of taking photographs or recording audio or shooting video and writing journalistic reports about 'events' I am mightily impressed with the way that a comic can/could tell the story of what occurred and why.

Even with photographs -- any report is going to limit itself to one or two shots, or, as happens nowadays online, to a slideshow. But as soon as you edit and  place the images  into a series of panels, add captions and whatever, you are, in effect, creating a comic -- except there is no drawing involved. Your placement or caption and commentary is nonetheless going to serve as a graphic representation of your topic. 

I take the view that it is better to use filters on your images so that they look unreal -- like they are indeed drawn or water coloured rather than simply photographed. I think it is important -- and here my Bertolt Brecht training shines through -- that the means to the medium is self evident to the viewer and that your effort is presented as something heightened and unusual (Brecht called it 'alienated').

Its' all about a different way to see.

This notion is what is driving my every other day creative efforts. 

"What if," I ask myself, "I can turn any event into a comic -- even the most mundane routines of my daily existence? "

I'm not saying I'm going to do that but anything could be comicified by firstly drawing or photographing and image of it; and, secondly, selectively arranging those images together while, as required, adding text.

It's Storytelling 101. 

Obviously a single image doesn't have to carry the weight of the whole story. Instead a 'comic'  has several images bought together as montage -- edited. That's what 'montage' means --  it's French  for "organize".

I'm finding that with modern digital cameras -- and mine is a very cheap miniature  device -- you can shoot any number of images in the context of 'the event' so long as you have a narrative plan and perspective you can later develop further when you come to editing, selecting and organising.

So it's not about the best of all possible shots but how you intend to format the flow and perspective  later when you edit and arrange the images you shoot.

Of course this is how you make a video. But video editing has its complications and for me the two primary ones are transitions from one clip to another and the time length of each clip.This has a lot to do with pacing and what the human eye and its mind can or cannot tolerate before the owner of the eyes protests.

With comics you are not  limited by the pressure of time and transitions  aren't so brutally demanding. Comic storytellers use a lot of  devices to move around both place and time. They also know that if they lose the reader's comprehension for a  moment they  always have the option to go back and re-read what they may have missed. On a film that ready rewind is not an easy choice as it will undermine the flow.

There is a difference, you see between a McLuhanist 'hot' and a McLuhanist 'cold'.

Comics, in contrast, are much more staccato -- panel by panel -- and much more self evidently outside us as a self evident medium -- much closer to reading a book -- than watching a film or video.  The identifier quotient is less and potentially the informational density is more.

It's not as though I've suddenly developed a novel POV on comics. I've been fascinated by narrative art for decades --especially the work of Pieter Breghel -- the 16th Century Flemish painter.

Breghel created 'comics' in the one panel that told stories as did William Hogarth, (another hobby of mine) et al.

So it's like all my chickens have come home...

Comic toolbox 

That said, I'm thinking that aside from a good comic making ap or program -- I use ComicLife -- and a digital camera, maybe the toolbox should also include -- esp for the serious comic journo -- some means to tape audio.

It is hard to shoot  photographs and scribble down quotes at the same time and audio will also allow you to insert 'notes to self.'  A great comic --  Maus -- is resourced from   the audio recording of the reminiscences of Art Spiegelman's father.

Unfortunately, while folk like Dan Archer do do it, converting a comic as is to video doesn't work very well and I really don't see the point for online consumption. Comics may make great movies -- consider A History of Violence, Persepolis, etc -- if animated or acted with flesh and blood folks, but still life images arranged together in a video is just another slide show.

And here's a knee up: comics made from photographs require no drawing skills. That may upset the old guard and and those who can actually draw -- but I think the graphic artsy-ness of comics is a bit over  rated.  A good comic has to rely absolutely on the strength of its  storytelling and the trim of its dialogue.

I likem my art -- and I love a lot of comic art -- but that's dress up for the main game. The irony is that how a comic is illustrated won't decide its message.

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Going back to my puppetry roots in a sandbox.

Going back to my puppetry roots in a sandbox.

I used to work as a Punch and Judy 'Professor' . The professorship  isn't awarded by some prestigious campus. It is a title you award yourself by being a 'professor' of Punchology.

How well you earn it is up to you despite what the traditional already-existing- professors may think. Peer review isn't regulated.

Real Punchology supposedly uses a swazzle and no professor earns their title -- according to the Old Guard -- unless they have swallowed it at least twice.

When you're performing , you are 'it': all the characters, their different voices and actions, the script, the ab libs --- the whole kit and kaboodle of the show is what you put together yourself.  

To be a real Prof you also have to make your own puppets. 

So you can imagine how dedicated  a Punch Professor  is to his puppet characters. 

They're bread and butter. His tool set. They're family. Just like Geppetto and Pinocchio.

So when I began to explore my comic -- as in comic book --  options it was a wunderbar moment when I decided I'd give Punch another go at existence. So I resurrected my puppets from the shed, and started to photograph  myself interacting with them. 

Talk about fun! It was the second coming of Punch.

So now I'm making this webcomic which I call by the obscure title,  Mr Punch and Professor Ratbaggy (Emeritis).

While I'm still finding my way, I at least have a platform -- a stage -- a booth -- in which to work. It's all digital, of course, but my sense of the language and sitcom of those in-the-booth days in front of rioting children has come back to me.

I have my own show, once again.

What's happens hereafter is going to be interesting. I have to work through a few Punchology issues in way of fleshing out the characters I'm working with. So I'm gonna be rude, crude and naughty  as befits Mr Punch while also exploring how far I can use his nibs to tackle the big issues. 

The voice I'm beginning to hear in my head is increasingly mordant. Harnessing that vocal is going to be  something to work towards. 

As I build in confidence I may tackle some other comic book/ graphic projects but this Punch lark is going to be my sandbox.

A steep learning curve.

The delight, you see, is that I have been frustrated for several  years trying to find 'my voice'. I've written  plays, satires, street theatre,newspaper columns,  journalism, essays, reviews, blog posts a'plenty ... and produced audio and video -- but none  of these media sat  so well with me as this comic stuff does.

If I wasn't so chronically ill I'd be doing some performing. Being a Punch Professor was my last hurrah in that regard.

Now I come back at that, considerate of my limitations but still keen to harness whatever are my remaing talents.

And I do this at an online  moment when webcomics are beginning to take off.  And webcomics are an exciting platform:

The freedom webcomics provide allows artists to work in nontraditional styles. Clip art or photo comics (also known as fumetti) are types of webcomics that do not use traditional artwork. ... As in the constrained comics tradition, a few webcomics... are created with most strips having art copied exactly from one (or a handful of) template comics and only the text changing.Webcomics that are independently published are not subject to the content restrictions of book publishers or newspaper syndicates, enjoying an artistic freedom similar to underground and alternative comics....Scott McCloud, one of the first advocates of webcomics, has pioneered the idea of the infinite canvas where, rather than being confined to normal print dimensions, artists are free to spread out in any direction indefinitely with their comics.... 

Exciting, and fun! Doing this stuff is almost thrilling.

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The Comic Masquerade

The Comic Masquerade

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Finally, after experimenting and negotiating a learning curve I suspect that I am now able to embrace a comic life. Since I am not keen to put in the hard yards at the end of a pencil or pen I have to make do by reworking photographs.

Being a Mac user I am currently combining  a couple of aps:

• PhotoEffects which I'm using to rework --and often take -- the original photograph
• Noir Photo  for later processing: enriching the contrast and focus -- as I'm after the sharp black background.

I hope that by standardising this editing protocol I can convert a range of different images to a standard comic format that will constitute my 'style'.

And I want to do that quickly without dramas.

Characters, situations, topics and whatever content are different , for now, from the form. I wanted the means, the medium, settled before  I could then explore the language.

Photo Comics are rare in the English speaking world outside of some Photonovels adapted from film or TV series. The term Fumetti (Italian for comic -- "litte puffs of smoke" ) is often deployed to describe these  but now that there are so many easy-to-use photo aps  available, who knows what may happen?

To give you an idea of what can be done, here are my four favorite Photo Comic sites online:

• A Comic Life, Indeed
• LifeStrips
• Phil's Comic Life
• Unsettled Skies

Inventive stuff. Creative. Some -- LifeStrips and Unsettled Skies -- are arty.  Obviously if you use Photoshop you are going to get a sharper, neater 'effect'. But me, I want to focus on the storyline --such as it may be -- and the dialogue. 

That way you are better placed to be optioned by Hollywood. (!)

I read a lot of graphic novels and while the art has its charms, my preference is for the pacing, dialogue and story telling. I nonetheless appreciate the POV compositions and my enthusiasm runs to film noir type perspectives -- expressionist stuff. 

It's like making a feature film but without having to work with actors. B grade film making perhaps with cheap actors.

I, on the other hand, have to act in my own 'comics' or find folk who will hold a pose for me while I take a photograph of them. 

For now, I'm not storyboarding what I make as I'm relying  on improvising the images and drawing on them for inspiration. 

But I want to advance to the stage where I sit down and write the thing and then use what I've written as the shooting script.

And filming may not be so difficult if you are Noir obsessed as I am. With noir you want sharp contrast , clear  outline, limited detail, exaggerated focus...and you can get that by using just one light source. That's where the shadows come from. Noir is all about harnessing shadows.

The appeal is that since my preference and background has been with masks  -- that's where I begin, at  the face. The scenery is not so important to me. It's like a Shakespeare play or street theatre or theatre in the round. The basics is da people relating to you or others. 

Why complicate things? Why introduce distractions?  I want to work within those limitations. That's my platform: was in theatre, same with comics.

A comic masquerade.

This means that you gotta go grotesque and exaggerate the gestures or the facial expression. It isn't a photo op for the mags or the family album. You're cartooning -- channeling caricature.

Again I have the advantage of having worked in puppetry -- Punch and Judy especially -- and that's what I'm after: that sort of cartoony grotesque. While you can do that performing with puppets they can't change their expression from scene to scene or from  panel to panel. In masked performance you rely on body gesture just as with puppets you move their little heads to suggest that the figure is speaking.

So as actors on a photograph, puppets are limited....but it is nice to use them. They work for peanuts.

My comic  gallery is located on my Paste Up site.

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'Maus' and 'Persepolis': We are all sentenced to history

'Maus' and 'Persepolis': We are all sentenced to history

I want to explore two graphic novels here: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Maus by Art Spiegelman.

Well what can I say? I think Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels are the best novels I've read in years. The storytelling -- given the graphic tool --is so fluid. There is an easier focus than what you have to put up with in all that is written textually in filagree. It's drama craft without the characters having to depart stage left (and explain their exit) before the story can proceed.

She -- Satrapi -- is a master of this.

Simple storytelling hones to the essentials. This series is a masterpiece that transcends some of the achievements of Maus that inspired it.

But I can't help comparing the two projects as they are so similar, almost parallel. Religion obviously is a link, but so too is family -- but 'family' in the context of extraordinary events.

The device Art Spiegelman uses in Maus -- in effect, using Disney cartoon tricks to tell a story is so effective that it takes the work some where outside first person reminiscing.

You can't call it 'cute' because as you read, it becomes so natural that these humans masquerade as animals.

While the relations in Maus may cause us to question our humanity -- at its core Spiegelman's story is a homage to his family -- just as Satrapi's is to her's.

If it wasn't for that, these works would lose some of their power. But their strength is that even without these major events holding the characters hostage they'd still work. Both are so brutally intimate, so relentlessly focused on the experience of living -- and surviving -- that you too are transported to the same historical moment and asked to consider: could you do any better?

Neither work is peopled with heroes. Victims abound (and the dead, of course) -- but , ultimately, it all comes down to finding ways to survive, ways to remain sane...in the hope of finding something better for yourself.

The basics rule. It's starker in Maus than in Persepolis but as Bertolt Brecht wrote, "first the belly, then morality".

He could also have said," first the belly and the mind...then morality."

How true is that? And who are we to rule otherwise? Satrapi's irony is that she spends so much time 'off stage'. While the big production number -- the Iranian Revolution -- falls to a deepening reaction -- she's wallowing in self pity and angst in Vienna. In a sense the savage hand of the revolution reaches out to oppress her despite and because of her isolation.

It's the same with Spiegelman's father in Maus. He may have survived Auschwitz but that same dead hand ruled the rest of his life...and Art Spiegelman's apparently.

We are all sentenced to history. We may look upon our version of it as purely biographical but the big picture festers all around us.

[But then I guess I should say that some of us are more sentenced than others. There are  victims  and then there are the lucky ones. Maybe we take it in turns, but some of us are more victimised than others because some of us are more oppressed. ]

Afterward
Survival, as Maus insists, was mainly about pure luck. Humans, esp human Jews, were mere disposable play things. We may not like the father but we cannot hold it against him that he survived the camps.

First survival, then morality.

That said there is a celebration inherent in surviving the Holocaust which is deployed as an underpinning for the state of Israel. Maus doesn't do that . It's not Zionist at all. So it's not fair to mix the perspectives up.

Even in the comic it's clear that Jews who survived the camps were not guaranteed easy refugee status.

Then there is the complication of judging 'survival' by any means necessary...

Well there is some interestring stories in that light -- Empire of the Sun, King Rat ..come to mind. Survival has its own rewards and tragically the American take on the Ethics of it where all the good guys make it is a total fantasy. The world ain't like that. Nor does it follow that the 'bad' survive instead.

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Bruce Mutard: The Sacrifice -- World War II was not all ANZAC spirit and flag waving solidarity

Bruce Mutard: The Sacrifice -- World War II was not all ANZAC spirit and flag waving solidarity

I don't know about you but Australia's Second World War years are obscured in my mind by a melange of family reminiscences and ab hoc snippets of history.

My parents were of the generation who were caught up in the war effort locally and offshore so the family album began life very much with  pics of folk in khaki.

Us baby boomers were delayed sprogs of them days.

But  as far as I was concerned, and those of my generation,  them days were their's not mine.

So it is unusual that Bruce Mutard , who is very much a contemporary, should  attempt to capture that period in, of all things, a graphic novel -- The Sacrifice.

He is not from there and then. You'd think that since he isn't a writer of that period  he cannot  offer a memoir that can capture the times. You may also wonder -- as I did -- why would he bother? Why go back to 1939 and thereabouts to begin what he promises us is a three volume story on the life of Robert Wells.

Who? Never heard of him, right?

This is fiction so Wells is unlikely to be some one's granddad. But then...

Mutard has done an extraordinary job of taking us back to Melbourne in 1939 - 1941  and capturing the substance of the period in a way I have not found any where else except hinted at in my own family members' reminiscences and the recall of old Communist Party members I have worked with.

These times were amazing times. Australia committed itself to a massive international slaughter and retoooled the economy and society to serve that singular end. 

Jingoism over ruled all objections -- but so too did a quickly engineered  corporatist state and a war economy.

And it wasn't all ANZAC spirit and flag waving solidarity. It wasn't a RSL retelling. The story of Robert Wells, the keen pacifist with Communist Party friends, congeals a lot of the issues that are neglected each time we are told not to forget.

History afterall, is so often about  choosing what to remember.

The Sacrifice:Australian and US soldiers brawl in 1941 outside Flinders Street Railway Station

In that sense -- in the sense of what we are encouraged to believe in -- Mutard's pre and at war Melbourne is a revelation. So tangible. So geographic with street directory precision. It's like my parents photograph album has come alive. I could pass this 'comic' around a bunch of 80 year olds and they'd delight in the  cityscapes. And acknowledge the events. Then add their own layer of storytelling.

His depiction of St Kilda, where Wells lives, is like peeling back that suburb's contemporary facades to the raw brick and weather board of the past. That sense of time and place -- and history -- is buoyed up by a rigorous chronology that is a revelation: not just in way of nostalgia and anecdote but  of underlying tragedies that are never acknowledged from the POV of our contemporary comforts.

There is one segment in The Sacrifice which epitomises Mutard's graphic  attainments. Wells is on leave from boot camp and must travel across St Kilda home late one night. It's 1941 and the city is occupied by US troops. In a series of darkly forbidding panels the impact of the war on the life of the city is played as a montage of  debauchery and crime. The home front was at war with itself. 

No patriotism. No comradeship. Instead  a pervasive and threatening anarchy.

In similar mode, Wells' friends -- local communists who are part of the Acland Street bohemia --  are fleshed out with more verve than  most Communist Party memoirs even manage. They may be treated with respect but they are not cast as a bunch of working class heroes nor prattling dogmatists. 

For me, The Sacrifice serves as history. It may not be foot noted and there is no bibliography, but the angst and troubles of Robert Wells make me re-consider that time and the people who shared it with him. 

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Why we are girted by sea

Why we are girted by sea

Over here we have a big enough task making ends meet. Over there it is probably the same…but hey! we're not over there, we're over here. And since we are over here, over there is a world away.Thus the girt! So who gives a stuff, if over there gets it tougher than we get it over here.It's all relative. That's life.

Fortunately it 's not ours.

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