Ode to Socks

A poem by Pablo Neruda, illustrated with images by Paul Klee, whose work is perfectly suited for this kind of thing. All I did was stick the two together.

Under the Radar

Totalitarian regimes often employ strong centralised censorship of media channels as a means of exercising control. It's interesting to note how often these operations develop blind spots to particular media, allowing some discourse against government ideas to filter through. The blind spots often develop around areas of humour or fantasy - seemingly pointing to a certain literal-mindedness or lack of imagination in the average dictator and his or her apparatus of control.

The most commonly cited example of this is the Soviet era's willingness to publish science fiction, such as Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" and the Strugatsky brothers' "Monday begins on Saturday", which offered thinly-veiled criticisms of the state. Not all subversive work escaped the censors - Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" was largely circulated via underground channels, for example, but still many subjects could be broached because they were done so in disguise.

The example of this topic that we'll examine today is the syndicated cartoon strip "Feeling Lucky, Adventure Jim?", which appeared in the Ogopathian tabloid newspaper "Petelin", (literally "The Cockerel", but linked via various phrases to the concept of freedom) in the years immediately after the digital revolution known internally as The Encryption. As a state-registered publication, Petelin was watched closely by the Ministry of Information, and editorial and news content followed the party line. The curiously-titled "Adventure Jim" typically featured on the back page, and purported to inform citizens of the appropriate response to the new surveillance technologies that were being rolled out across the country. An early example does this in a rather straightforward fashion, although the somewhat clownish appearance of the eponymous hero strikes an odd note from the start.

 Jim assures us that he is lucky, to have the support of the Ministry in thinking an acting like a citizen of the new regime.

Within a matter of weeks, the tone of the strip has changed somewhat, offering a range of rather disconcerting imagery, such as the representation of the state as a bowl of talking disinfectant:

Sufficient elements of the earlier strips, and of official party wording, are retained, but the juxtaposition of the phrase "emptiness is serenity" with Jim's look of outrage or horror tells us a lot about the cartoonist's sympathies, and his/her expectations as to what the largely automated censorship process will and won't pick up on. (The identity of "Buffalo" has never been firmly established, and, as has been noted elsewhere, the symbol of the Buffalo was co-opted by both the ruling committee and elements of the early resistance, based on the ambiguity of the nonsense sentence popularised by the jazz band The Overcoats in the years immediately prior to The Encryption.)

Having secured a few column inches out of the censor's watch, Buffalo appears to have placed a test strip that openly lampoons the earlier message:

Having got away with that, subsequent strips appear to offer veiled references to emerging technologies being developed by the Ministry of Information, and their deployment.

The nonsensical reference in the strapline message has been speculatively linked to the town of Cnoot, out of which a cell of resistance operated for some years. Further strips demonstrate awareness of the micro-sensors that were deployed in the third decade after encryption, and of the cottage industry of "tin foil hats" thought to guard against some of the Ministry's more intrusive systems.

It should be pointed out that the samples shown here illustrate the few examples of direct knowledge of Ministry activity, and that inbetween times, the strp would run for weeks in a rather more whimsical mode, developing the diverse cast of characters including the increasingly argumentative feet, and the singing bath tub. Whatever the nature of the elusive Buffalo, the strip ran for little more than two years before it was unceremoniously dropped, and most references to it within official documentation wiped. 

In contrast to the slow-moving bureaucracy of the Soviet era, the censorship apparatus of post-Encryption Ogopathia was highly adaptive and innovative, and one can only assume that Jim's adventurous author soon found that his/her luck had run out.

Divide: part 2

Picking up where last week's story left off...

Divide: Part 1

Taking a break from free stock photo services this week (and next) to plunder the world of (out of copyright) 20th Century art. Welcome to the world of an ex-art forger as dementia takes hold.

This strip got a bit out of hand, so I'll run it over two weeks...

Twelve Easy Pieces

When I'm not doing comics, I'm often found doing code. Here's an experiment that combines the two. I've cut out 42 roughly equal-sized panels from drawings that I've done, and randomly recombined them on top of a six panel script. Look at how the words and pictures dance together, and modify each other's meanings!

The drawings are rather rough. The script is hardly epic (yet!). But I'm already quite excited by the possibilities of this. So excited, in fact, that I'm breaking the usual schedule to post this right now!!

The internal repetition on the first one was a lucky accident. Both silent panels (I think these are important in comics storytelling in general) came out the same. Or the weeping muscular figure in variant #5, reprised in the ending of variant #11.

Wandering Aengus returns

There's more than one way to adapt a piece of art to a new medium, and this was a rather extreme exercise in proving it! After last week's emotion-driven, sensuous adaptation of Yeat's poem, here's a highly formalistic, structure-bound, reductionist interpretation, driven by the rational left-brain. There's a  trick I've come across in creative writing exercises, of introducing artificial constraints into a story in order to force creativity in new directions, and this was all about layng down so many rules that I felt trapped!

The poem follows a fixed structure, being composed of three verses of eight lines each. That's twenty-four lines, so I've divided the page into 24 panels, with each verse getting two lines of the comic grid. Within that, each panel is divided into a 2x2 arrangement, which I've allowed myself flexibility about populating, with between two and four images, each literally representing a word from the relevant line of the poem. Playing with words, and with synonyms (that's words that sound the same) is allowed, and repetition is allowed too. But each image has to relate to a single word, not just capture the sense of the line as a whole.

I wanted to get away from the romantic imagery commonly associated with/evoked by Yeats, which dominated my previous interpretation. So the original plan for prosaic imagery was to get every picture from supermarket websites, but I gave up on that and just went for google images in the end, plus a few of my own photos thrown in where they'd fit. (Techno-chef Heston Blumenthal is a mascot/spokesperson for Waitrose, and his inclusion in here stems from that early, abandoned decision about supermarkets, although the reader is free to interpret his presence in other ways too, of course.)

The process helped me to appreciate the structure of the poem. There may be new insights in there for the reader - there are certainly bad puns to spot too, and some interesting jarring between the romantic and the prosaic, and hopefully it becomes more than just a crossword puzzle and sheds some new light on the poem for you.

As I said, lots of images were grabbed from Google Images. I've avoided taking anything with a large copyright notice or any other restrictions attached to it. If you think I've stepped on your copyright, please let me know, and I can update this - every little bit of this is easily replaced.

Wandering Aengus

Adaptation of W.B. Yeat's poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus", revelling in the lush visual imagery of the poem, and the sensations it evokes, in a full-page-layout, over-the-top multi-media-fest!

All three pages were done as a single file in the Gimp, allowing me to track the visual repetition of elements from one page to the next.

A second, structurally very different, adaptation of the same poem will be appearing in a few days - watch this space!

Jabberwocky

A recent piece, part of a series of exercises I've been working on that look at adapting classics from other media into comic form, while avoiding the obvious route.

I've taken Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "Jabberwocky", which he composed largely of imaginary words - arguably in an attempt to keep the reader guessing as to what he was on about, and force them to engage in their own interpretation.

The narrator here hasn't got a clue what he's on about, and manages to convey something of the impression the poem's made on him, while completely and utterly failing to describe the poem itself.

The model for this character is Microsoft's outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, who has wonderfully over-the-top hand gestures and body language when he's presenting on stage.

Cells

Another go at those famous painters, after the highly figurative Bruegel, I wanted to have a go at the abstract end of the scale, so here's Mondrian.

attacking one of his famous grid paintings let me build up a nice little abstract comic, but, as Andrew Molotiu points out in his anthology, abstract comics aren't necessarily just collections of abstract images. Here's an attempt at telling the life story of an abstract being in one page.

And finally, the same story, reshaped to explore the dramatic effects of changing panel size.

Dusk

Cutting corners: creating comics is gruelling, and there are so many visual resources available. I wanted to explore repetition a bit further, and also see if I could create a coherent story from the works of a famous painter. Starting off easy, Peter Bruegel's work has a strong narrative feel to it, although that could have worked against me. It would have been easy to tell one of the stories that he's already told in his paintings (and he fitted in hundreds!), but where's the fun in that?

I wanted to do two things here.

Communicate an ineffable experience, something that couldn't be put into words easily. For much of the middle page, our narrator's lost for words, and the pictures lose their figurative-ness.

I also wanted to play with repetition. We see the face of the farm-girl with the  rake several times, but the intervening narrative changes what we see. (Yeah, and the mood lighting I added!) The pictures in a comic aren't isolated, but glued into the  whole.