"originality is a red herring", or, Reenactment Art part 203

At The Comics Journal, an interview with Josh Bayer about Bayer's "covers comics" project, which writer Brandon Sodeberg describes thus:

"Rom recreates, panel-by-panel, stories from the Marvel space-knight book from the eighties, locating the still vital energy of this work, while also shaking off its relatively square and mainstream-courting tics. It’s the difference between say, the Kingsmen’s mealy-mouthed though radio-friendly version of “Louie Louie”, and say, Black Flag’s grinding, raucous reinterpretation."


Some Josh Bayer quotes from the piece:

"There was no master plan when I began Rom, though in some ways, I feel like “covering” or feeling free to appropriate is something I’ve been leading up to for years. I’ve always been excited by the idea that originality is a fucking red herring. People talk about being original like it’s so beneficial to everybody, but it isn’t. I remember a Kathleen Hanna interview in Maximum Rock & Roll where she was like, “People say that I sound like Poly Styrene but I don’t take that as a negative thing. I’m not into the novelty of the new.” I really love that phrase, “the novelty of the new.”

[Well, I love Hanna's rhetorical sleight, where a preference for innovation over reiteration, the original over the copy, comes to seem sneer-worthy. Those silly, shallow seekers of mere novelty!]

"... My Rom stories are loose adaptations. I change the names of all the characters except Rom, usually. I call the Dire Wraiths [from Rom] Verminous Knids after the villains from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator because they are really, really similar. I’m willing to get things wrong and I’ve found out that a fuck-up can be much more interesting. It fits with my aesthetic of scraping together the book with scraps of bubblegum and shoelaces."

I guess Shakespeare worked with other earlier dramatist's storylines and old legends and historical tales and so forth, so why not?

The original

 

The cover version

 

Two earlier posts on retro-izm in comics -- Daniel Cowes and the vintage / mid-century aesthetic in illustration and graphic novels, and a post picking up on some parallels drawn between retro-rock and the comix world by Marc Singer of I Am NOT The Beastmaster

Comix dude Marc Singer of I Am NOT the Beastmaster blog on Retromania

Singer finds all kinds of parallels in the discourse around comics / graphic novels that parallel the disquiets and gripes of my book:

e.g. Dorian Wright on Steven Moffat's Doctor Who:

"...the people in charge of the show aren’t interested in people who are Doctor Who fans, they’re interested in people who are fans. Full stop. People who are, essentially fans of…being fans. Who just like to be into…things. Because it’s a thing, and God help you if you’re not into it. They want to please that mercurial, fickle, transitory audience that watches an episode and immediately floods the internet with animated gifs and posts on Twitter and Tumblr about their 'feels' about the show and who communicate with one another entirely in references to pop culture ephemera, like that really shitty Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, only with jokes about bronies and t-shirts mashing up Dexter and Game of Thrones."

e.g. Andrew Hickey, following up Wright's points:

"The thinking behind it is precisely the same thinking that is used in every shitty image macro you’ve ever seen, a sort of post-postmodernism for cretins. Take two symbols of “awesome” and bash them together, and generate something more “awesome”. It’s the postmodern technique of collaging signifiers divorced from their context, but with the difference that you must show absolutely no interest whatsoever in investigating any ideas that this juxtaposition might inspire.

[...] The logic of surrealism is not that far from the logic of the tumblr meme, after all — put two familiar things, like a lobster and a telephone, together and see what kind of interference pattern results in our mind. But the choices in this series are from what seems to be a pre-approved list of “awesome” stuff. Film noir detectives and time travel, dinosaurs and spaceships, cyborgs and cowboys, Daleks and ballerinas. The kind of combuination that only the most tediously unimaginative person could ever possibly think was original. No doubt next year we’ll have cats with lasers (inspiring jokes about how now it’s them with the laser pointer), monkeys riding unicorns, pirates eating bacon, and steampunk lesbian sumo wrestlers teaming up with Sherlock Holmes".

Singer himself identifies a parallel between "glutted and clotted"/hyperstasis and "Final Crisis" or indeed projects by "Morrison or Alan Moore or any other creator who's become captured by pop culture's bottomless past", then signs off with a quote plucked from a comic panel (the serial unknown to me, though clearly needing no introduction to the hardcore cognoscenti who read his blog):

"Perhaps, Agent Helligan, when a civilization reaches its peak, there comes a time of harvest, let’s say. After the ripening comes inevitable decay. With predictable and grim implications for your own civilization."

"sometimes the presents seems so dated!" / retro in comix

retromaniacal tinge to this funnie

(via Stanley Whyte)

reminded me, rather tangentially, of this Dan Clowes strip about a timewarp cultist who lives in a perpetual 1966

 
 
Thinking of Clowes's work, reminded me that I have some disordered and unformed thoughts about why it is that the dominant mode in comix, cartoons, illustration is  retro.

because  it is, isn't it? Go into a place like Wacko in Los Feliz, LA, and everywhere you look you see new work done in old illustrative and graphic art styles.... vintage fonts and typography and lettering...  campy Googie-era Fifites here, Gothic American there, B-movie psychotronic trash kultur etc

is it because, being as close to the world of craft as Art, the illustration/comix world is less hung up on modernist precepts?

But most of the comic/cartoon/illustration styles being reworked or drawn on, in their own time, would have been innovative, presumably?

^^^^^^^^

Here's a little thing I did on Daniel Clowes's Caricature collection (whence the 1966-dude strip comes from) for Village Voice Literary Supplement.

Daniel Clowes

Caricature

Fantagraphic Books, Inc

Cartoonist Daniel Clowes's stories are set  in some  all-American twilight zone of Hopper-esque diners, lugubrious motel rooms and desolate streetscapes. Time and place are deliberately left non-specific--it's the Big City, any-postwar-year-- allowing Clowes to indulge his fondness for  the kind of quaint furnishings and appliances (e.g. barber's chairs) that now sell as overpriced antiques in  "architectural salvage" stores.  Some of the stories in Clowes' new collection Caricature veer into the full-on noir surrealism of  Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron  (his famous Twin Peaks-like serial driven  by non-sequiturs and a mystery narrative that never resolves itself). But most develop further the seedy realism of  his superb 1997 graphic novel Ghost World,  conjuring a world that's all the more uncanny because the blatantly supernatural rarely occurs. Caricature's most poignant stories seem autobiographical:   brink-of-puberty vignettes "Immortal, Invisible" and "Like A Weed, Joe", and  "Blue Italian Shit", a memoir of life as johnny-come-lately punk at the tail end of the Seventies. From the title story's fairground caricaturist to the decrepit  cartoon superhero in "Black Nylon" and the pugnacious epigone in "MCMLXVI"  (who believes American culture peaked circa 1966) Clowes's forte is stalled lives and blocked dreams. Nobody  can rival him when it comes to the physiognomy of anomie--he's  a virtuoso at jaded eyes, non-commital mouths, and the myriad facial nuances of affectlessness.

 

And here's theVoice piece by me on Ghost World the movie, which features quotes from Clowes as well as Terry Zwigoff, and has that whole retro-pathos subplot of the 78 rpm platter collector scene, the choleric Seymour character added gratuitously and largely eclipsing the Enid-Rebecca relationship.