Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #4: Reassembled

The latest issue of “The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred” (#4 of 6) is an open experiment in Dadaism.  They’ve invited the reader to cut it up and make their own story.  So I did.  Here it is.  It's roughly 19 megs of .pdf surrealism. Enjoy.

http://www.mediafire.com/?1x7i37w7ta5njx5

I read this issue-as-published once all the way through and it made completely no sense.  I knew it wasn’t suppose to, I’m familiar with cut-ups from reading Burroughs in high school/college.  I didn’t really understand it then, I still don’t completely understand it now.  I do better with poetry.  If I can read the abstract image that the poem is purposefully or accidentally trying to invoke in a very pure thought and/or emotion, I follow the narrative (however loosely) a bit better.  This is my attempt at imposing order on chaos.  I tried really hard to look for narrative and visual transitions between panels that threaded a path, while still being textually self-aware of the Dada aspect of the whole thing…which if the ultimate goal is for art to inspire art, then it worked.  I made a new story. 

It was a lot of staring at the panels.  I made black and white copies of all the pages, cut them up with a mat board and an exacto-blade then laid them all out on our dining room table.  I think the panels being b&w might have had a less than exciting influence on me, Kane’s art is eye-mind melting and to take away the color is to take away the true impact of the images.

And that’s when my lovely and talented wife stepped in, I could scan the book and rearrange those panels in any order you like in photoshop, to which I replied “Fuck Yeah!” It took her sometime and I thank her profusely for it, she is amazing and I am incredibly lucky to be with her.

I looked for groupings of panels that made sense together first, like the “Hairy man,” and JFK getting shot up by the MIBs.  The meteor shower being prevalent in so many  helped, the George Adamski panels too.  Steve Newman’s dreamscape is really the only setting.  If you accept that (“the willing suspension of disbelief”---coincidently(?) the same message Adamski gives the Pope from the Space Brethren—at least in my version) forgives the non-sequitor panel transitions a little.  It lends itself well to Steve’s alien abduction scenario around page 13. 

Past that it gets increasingly self referential to older characters: the Twins, Red Wraith, Aunt Sharon.  I use the eyeball in the box as a transition for the narrator’s observation “no man is born bad, the seed of evil grows in tainted soil.  Some day the taunts and the jeering of his class mates will yield a bitter fruit.”  Followed by a historical retrospective of evil and conspiracy.  There’s a panel I use in the JFK sequence that’s really Magritte’s painting Time Transfixed but with UFOs coming out of the fireplace instead of a train.  Magritte’s surrealism is right at home here in H&K’s non-linear narrative panels experiment.  It gets a bit dicy-ier from there on out.  I don’t know if there’s really any cohesive narrative thread there after page 14-15.  I tried for about a week (after rereading bits and pieces every day for about 2 weeks) with the loose panels.  The more I look at it the more I feel like I can randomly shuffle pages toward the end and still change it for the better. 

One thing I did notice, on the second to the last page of the issue, in the “Destroyovski” column, was a photo of all 84 loose panels but without any narrative or dialog balloons.  What’s that all about?  Did Hine write the dialog after H&K invited their mates to a friendly pub shuffle?  I’d like to know.  So I posted this question in the comments section of his blog on a posting about BPC:D#4:

“Hey Mr. Hine, did you write the dialog for Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #4 before or after you and your coconspirators arranged the present published layout?  I noticed in Destroyovski’s editorial section the panels in the photos are absent of word boxes/balloons.  How Dada did you get?”

A couple days later I got this response from Mr. Hine on his website: " Some of the dialogue and captions I wrote in advance along with the panel descriptions I sent to Shaky. Most were written after the art came in. Those panels in the photo don't have any lettering because they are print-outs of the pre-publication art. Lettering is only added after the pages are sent to Richard Starkings' Comicraft for design and lettering. All lettering and captions were written before the final order of publication. I didn't want to be influenced by the juxtaposition of images. Those four full-page splashes were re-written to show how the juxtaposition of certain images can suggest new associations."

Thank you sir!

Overall I’m satisfied with the result.  Maybe there will be a new appreciation for the Dada with me, maybe I’ll see the surreal a little better.  I do like this issue now more, now that I’ve gone through the process of making it my own.  In order for the panels to make sense to me as a linear story I had to accept a certain amount of absurdity into the narrative sequence.  Accepting the absurdity was crucial, just-like-real-F’ing-life.  It made me really look at each panel and try and imagine the who, what, why, and how it fit in with the rest.  Every panel then became the potential for a new story thread.  It didn’t seem like a lot at first, then after a few days I realized I had to give much thought to each one.  I was intrigued.  I felt like I was on the verge of discovering some ancient secret formula of narrative images creating the true story, the one the creators intended. 

Thing is, H&K selected 84 random panels.  There never was an intended linear story.  I had attempted to super-impose a sense of order to the panels, a “story” of some sort, but in the end it became an extremely limited amount of control.  No matter how much I tried there was no way they were going to transition as easy as a Big Two superhero muti-title cross over, but with a little effort I was able to come up with a some-what linear story that descends into a character’s unconsciousness, that transitions into an opportunity for H&K (and me) to play with all sorts of levels of their multi-issue narrative.  I hope it make sense to you a little bit.  If they don’t make sense to you, F-you, cut your own up and make a new one then why don’t ya?       

The Secret #1

Jonathan Hickman (Red Mass for Mars, Nightly News, Red Wing, Fantastic Four) and Ryan Bodenheim (Red Mass for Mars, Fear Itself: Fearsome Four) have crafted a comic book with “Secret.”  Nothing is wasted, not pages not panels not gutters, it’s all there for H&B to play with, and they do it really well. 

Look at the pages above.  We see this masked man, brass-knuckled, fist cocked back mid-air, about to punch the living shit out of some guy he’s holding down.  Michael Garland did the coloring for this book and “Red Mass for Mars.”  The red pages above are the published pages, the image where the masked man is in black is from a promo preview page of the issue.  The red duotone is a marked improvement.  It sets the mood for this scary, violent encounter.  The palette changes as the book progresses but the duotone persists in setting tone scene after scene. 

I want to take this chance to mention here, one of the reasons this comic book is really good is because it looks and reads like a comic book, and not a screenplay storyboard.  It does what only a comic book can do (and should do) in that it tweaks our visual filter into a unique but forced perspective.  It is more than a suspension of disbelief that is essential in any fiction, it requires us to participate in a suspension of our default perception and surrender to that of the artist and writer.  Unlike a movie that dictates sight and sound, the comic panel has only the visual impact of its color, shape, and dialog.  It demands just a little more than the typical matinee, it requires our imagination.  We all have an internal voice when we read, and what we see influences how we read.   Can you say “WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE, WE GOT FUN AND GAMES!” without hearing Axl in your mind’s ear?  The panel doesn’t dictate all, it requires us to fulfill the other half of the visual narrative equation with our mind, even if it’s happening on a subconscious level.   And this is why I will always love comics more than movies. 

S says to me, without knowing anything about the comic or its author after I show her the first few pages, he knows how to manipulate type and image to his advantage.  Hickman if I remember correctly came from a world of graphic design, but I’ve been unable to confirm that anywhere.  The 5^th panel at the bottom of the page with the black ski-mask doesn’t hold the same dramatic weight as the same panel with the red ski-mask.  The black is what’s expected, almost safe(?) but the red screams.  The red is there unflinchingly.  The red is a visual representation for the simmering violence until it explodes through the panel.

Do you see how the masked man’s body rises out of the bottom bleed panel on page 1?  His violence overflows the panel, body winding up, the punch frozen in that moment where all his kinetic energy contracts the shoulder and bicep.   It is a visual comment on this character, his violence can not be contained.  It commands our attention as readers drawing us to the action on the page before we even know what’s going on.  We see it again on page 2, panel 2.  Our masked man’s head protrudes into panel 1, his dialog confirming what we’ve already come to suspect, “I am simply a man that cannot be kept out.” 

“Comic panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments,” according to Scott McCloud in "Understanding Comics," and “closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.” But what does the overflowing panel do to the narrative? What is the effect on closure?  On a subconscious level the reader is introduced to a character without physical constraints.  He goes where, and does what, he pleases.  He exists in a space outside his normal two dimensional physical, and here arguably moral, planes of his reality.  His presence in the panel gutters interferes with our sense of closure, he doesn’t allow us to imagine the transition from panel to panel. HE is the transition.  In our immediate consciousness there is a sense of the overwhelming, much like he has overwhelmed his captive.  The reader is just as bound to, and broken by, the masked man as is his prisoner, who we see again later on page 9 in a panel that’s literally drawn like the corner is broken off and detached.  It’s all just really great.  I love it, I really do.

Page 4 is a full splash page of what looks like solid black panes breaking, exposing a quote credited to an anonymous member of the East German secret police, the Stasi.  “We climb the wall to see the world we rule with secrets, lies, and half-truths.  We climb down to do murder.” Page 5 and 6 continue with a double splash page, “Chapter One: Teeth with Which to Eat,” the cover image doubled along side the text.  The broken glass runs over to page 7 but only covers the top left corner, about 20% of the page leaving the rest white.  It’s the equivalent of a title sequence fade in/out and it sets up the visual “silence” that precedes our home invasion victim’s broken panel beautifully.  How the quote foreshadows the narrative has yet to be seen, but the chapter title is aptly named.

I’m not going to tell you any more of the story.  I think it’s worth your $3.50 to find out on your own.  This book reminds me more of Hickman’s “Nightly News” than say “Transhuman” or any of his Marvel work.  Its design consciousness is both narrative and visual and it excels in both.  At its least maybe it’s a hyper-corporate-government-espionage-extortion-story, but there is more going on here.  It’s just a delight to read and look at it and we shouldn’t take that for granted, go buy it. 

The Secret Service #1

Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted, Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (best known for Watchmen with Alan Moore) have both done great work in the past.  I think “Wanted” is one of the best stories I’ve ever read.  Gibbons work on the “Martha Washington” series with Frank Miller is pretty cool.  Matthew Vaughn is a great director, I didn’t see X-Men First Class, but “Layer Cake” was awesome.  His work on “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” is wonderful.  But even with all that star power the book still comes off flat to me.  “The Secret Service” is not one of the best stories I’ve read, nor is it all that great to look at.  I tried repeatedly to come up with a good Colombian hooker joke, but the material was uninspiring.

It opens on a snow-covered chateau in Switzerland, where some swarthy-neutral gentlemen are holding Mark Hamill hostage.  There is a bit of good banter when one of the armed men asks Hamill “What did you think of the prequels, man? Don’t you think they were kinda pissing on your legacy a little?” But before we can figure out the motive behind the kidnapping---but not before finding out his destination, the Middle East, da-da-da-dummm---he is rescued by a British Secret Service agent, or sort of rescued.  After a short ski and snowmobile escape-chase the agent and Hamill go off a cliff.  The agent has a parachute, and in true Hollywood stuntman style grabs onto Hamill, but it doesn’t open.  He and Hamill die on impact.  It’s supposed to be funny, that I get, but the way the kidnappers talk it seems this was all part of the plan.  They expected them to go off the cliff, but they expected the chute to open.  Their boss, they say, is going to be very pissed about losing Hamill.  It opens up a bunch of plot questions, as it should, but losing Mark Hamill is my first problem with TSS.

I am tired of Star Wars references in scifi-fantasy-pop-alt-culture media.  It’s a cultural touchstone for geeks of the world to unite, one of the biggest if not universal to a generation of nerds.  It is over used, over played, and a cop out.  It’s lazy writing, I’ll make a Star Wars reference, old geeks love Star Wars references.  I don’t want to see another room numbered “1138” or someone telling someone else “these are not the droids you’re looking for.”  I just don’t care.  Show me something new, or at least in a new way.  Find something else, anything, but make it clever. If you can’t entertain me, inform me, if you can’t inform me, insult me, bring the fire, something, anything.  Anything but “it’s a trap!” or “do or do not, there is no try.” Writing a good story is not easy, if it was, everyone would do it.  Good writing is easy to identify, you read it and if it’s any good it invokes emotion.  Sadness, anger, passion, hope, fear, the better it is the harder it grabs you.   I don’t care how you do it just make me care about your story.

Ultimately that’s my problem with “The Secret Service,” I couldn’t find anything to care about, only more that just rubbed me wrong.  After the technical difficulties with the parachute we’re introduced to Gary, broken family, broken life.  Mom dates an abusive jerk who gets Gary’s little brother to roll spliffs for him.  Now let me explain spliffs to the uninformed.  They are a mixture of tobacco and marijuana, very popular in the Europe.  Coloring duties for TSS goes to Angus McKie, who sounds like a good Scotsman and all, but the “spliff” being rolled by Gary’s little brother has no green in it.  Not a speck.  Is it a censorship thing, like “oh we can’t show marijuana” so no green, or did no one see it when they proofed the copy?  The devil is in the details Angus, and the Devil’s Weed is green.

Next up, Gary’s uncle, Jack London, British spy.  He fills in the back story, getting the low down from a government official, that various members of the cast and crew of Star Wars, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Trek have been mysteriously kidnapped.  London asks if it was members of the original Star Trek or the Abrams’ version, which is perfect opportunity for Millar to inform us of his opinion of the film.  I don’t care what Millar thinks about Star Trek, if he wants to jerk off J.J. Abrams, do it on your own time, don’t make me pay $2.99 for it.  Guess what Mark, everybody loved the reboot.  Oooh I know, young geeks love the new Trek, I’ll make a new Trek reference.  Again, this is a cop out.  Either drive the story forward, increase the scope of the fictional world, or tease me with some cryptic info, but don’t, I REPEAT, DON’T WASTE MY FUCKING TIME.  How about this, how about take this panel to SAY something, something about this world we’re being introduced to, something about the characters that actually effects the story, or at the very least, something funny.  Instead Millar just wants us to know how much he has a hard-on for Karl Urban.        

Jack gets a text from Gary’s mom, Gary’s in trouble, he’s in jail.  He stole a car with some friends of his and crashed it.  They might have got away but a dog crossed their path so Gary had to swerve to avoid hitting it and crashed, see he has heart of gold this one, SEE? 

Uncle Jack shows up at the police station and he and mom get into it a bit.  Mom is pissed because Jack is rich and doesn’t break off a piece for her, and he berates her for being on welfare with a deadbeat for a boyfriend.  This tone continues into the precinct house where Jack sees Gary with a shiny new black eye, compliments of Southwark’s finest.   Where Jack applauds the cops manhandling his nephew a bit in an effort to set him straight, mom screams litigation to high heaven.  This is the one interesting note to the whole issue, Millar’s slightly to the right social discourse on modern England.  At one point mom screams “How am I supposed to control him?!” Jack responds “If you raised him right you wouldn’t need to control him.” Personal responsibility is at the heart of the argument for Millar.  Jack is disgusted by his sister and nephew, they are everything that is wrong with his England.  They do nothing but leech off of him and society, never seeing how their negative actions only lead to negative consequences, or once seeing it, not caring enough to do anything about it, it’s just easier this way.  Jack wants to leave Gary there in jail, but he can’t for the sake of his family.  He bails him out.

Gary goes home to the projects, he joins his friends drinking and smoking in a common area.  His uncle leers menacingly from a walkway above them.  Blue-fucking-tooth in ear he contacts “reception” and requests to be connected to the “Practical Skills Facility in Hereford, that’s right: The spy school.”  The lettering for “spy” really is in bold print too, I’m not making that up.  I wanted to throw the book away right then and there. 

Anger is an emotion I am familiar with, I have read things that make me angry.  Some will make you angry in a way that drives you to engage the text.  Like getting angry at the guys bulling Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.”  Others make you angry not at characters or story, but with the author.  Once the anger is directed at the author you’ve lost your reader.  You’ve taken them out of the story, you’re done, you’ve failed.  That’s why don’t tell me, show me is a cardinal rule of storytelling.  It’s that simple, and that complicated.  Again, if it was easy everyone would do it, but dammit man this one is pretty big, I expect more from the guy who made heroes out of villains.   

I really like Mark Millar.  I thought “Red Son” was a great concept, “Wanted” one of the best flips on the super hero genre in a long time.  I picked up all of Kick-Ass 1&2-saw the movie too, and I enjoyed “Superior,” Leinil Yu’s art is great.  “Nemesis” was highly entertaining.  This book, this book is just crap.  Gibbons art is okay, it wasn’t mind blowing in “Watchmen” either, but it fit the story.  Here it just looks…dated.  I get the feeling more and more Gibbons was the Jim Lee of his time, it’s pretty but I don’t really feel a lot going on there.  It’s too generic comic book cartoony.  I can’t excuse Matthew Vaughan for his involvement with this either, actions have consequences Matt, personal responsibility means taking ownership of your fuckups too.   It feels and looks too Hollywood.  It’s too slick in all the wrong ways.  See right here, right here a good Colombian hooker joke should go right here.  I can’t recommend this book to anyone, maybe a recommendation on what not to do in good comic book, then it would serve pretty good.