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.
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!
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?
No comments:
Post a Comment