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 Bulletproof Coffin Vol. 1

We need to talk about something very serious for a moment. I’m sorry it has to be in this forum. I’m sorry because it’s going to hurt your feelings and you are going to associate that with me, and that hurts me, but what I’m doing transcends whatever you and me are.

Comics can be art. They can carry as much symbolism and message as any other finely crafted artifact. Artifacts carry the meanings of entire cultures. They can capture the whole of a civilization in a simple urn or serve as vain, dusty monuments to long dead god-kings. But to the point, SOME OF THE COMICS YOU READ SUCK.

Don’t be angry with me; be angry with your self. Yes, I forgive you. I know how you feel I really do. You get some money, you go to the comic book shop, and the first shiny Ultimate-New-52-Crisis-On-Infinite-Assholes-Point bullshit you see you buy. You like the art and the story is okay, so a month later you buy the next one. That one is okay, so you might as well read the next one too. But that one is just flat. And so is the one after that. Now you’re 4 in to the 5-6-7-12 part series---and don’t forget (your favorite artist) is doing next issue’s crossover variant, OH I CAN’T STOP NOW! You whine like a child for its mother’s breast. This is how you stop the cycle of violence you mommy marvel teat sucking baby: Go and buy the trade paperback of “The Bulletproof Coffin.” Or better yet go onto ebay and find the individual issues. Sell an organ, maybe a handy-J or two, whatever you have to do to acquire this publication. This is all that’s going to save you.

David Hine has been writing comics since the early 80s, lots of comics. Go to his Wikipedia page here, if you don’t believe me. I felt a little bad to have not read more. I read X-Men: the 198, Spiderman Noir, and the X-Men Civil War stuff, but wasn’t really moved. I’m told Strange Embrace is cool but haven’t picked it up. Spiderman Noir is my personal favorite of the three I’ve read, but until BPC I wouldn’t have recognized his name. Michael Coulthard, aka “Shaky Kane,” has also been involved with comics since the early 80s. I’ve never read any 2000AD and the only Judge Dredd I have is a Batman crossover---which is pretty awesome. Simon Bisley did the art and won an Eisner in 1992 for it. He has a Frazetta/Sienkiewicz feel that I dig.

There is a really good interview with Hine & Kane over at The Comics Journal website. It does a good job of covering their pasts, work ethic, and where they see themselves going post BPC. There has been some recent dust up (here) about them cutting up a Fantastic Four #2 in an effort to Billy Burroughs the story. The cut-up technique was cool for Burroughs in 1955, but fuck if I know what The Nova Trilogy is about. You read it, you tell me. Burroughs called it “Mythology for the Space Age” and there is a mirroring in what Jack Kirby does in the early 1970s at DC with The Fourth World. It is an immediate and actively conscious effort to create something NEW; to take ancient concepts driven by primal behaviors seen through a modern psychic-lens of theoretical science and technology. There is also the presence of a spiritual philosophy professing interconnectivity, a macro-web that connects everyone with everything, throughout the whole of time and space, never really ending, never really beginning. Oh. My. God. I just had a thought…what if Jack Kirby illustrated a comic written by William S. Burroughs? How f-ing ultimate would that be!? Alejandro Jodorowsky does the movie adaptation and Brian Wilson does the soundtrack. I am so high right now.

There have been a good number of insightful reviews of BCP. People dissect the shit out’em, and get real Marianas on it. Go google them, I don’t have time to hold your hand. Like the reviews, what makes these books great is the detail. Not just the story and the art but little subtle things, like in issue #3, page 17. The page is printed to make it look like its corner is torn off, revealing page 19 below. You turn to page 18 and its corner is still printed like it’s torn, showing page 16. The main character in panel one of page 19 is holding a comic with the corner torn that looks exactly like the corner of your “torn” comic.

H&K constantly play with pop-culture symbols and icons on multiple levels, breaking the fourth wall with both their main character as he reads their comic, but us as their readers reading-their-comic-about their-main-character's-comic-reading-their-comic. Meaning morphs from one line to the next, through each panel, constantly being reworded and redrawn as something else to touch us deep inside that reptilian part of our brains.

Kane’s colors are synesthetic, how can you not hear The Retro Eye in the panel above fighting the red racist scourge? The missing narrator panel says because they’re fighting on the moon and space is a vacuum, there’re no sound effects, that we have to imagine the ker-pows! This is from issue #3 of their current efforts, "The Bulletproof Coffin, Disinterred.” Yes, those are communist-KKK-assassins, the “Kommunist Kill Kadre.” Do you understand why you have to buy this book now? Do you see why you have to help The Retro Eye and Coffin Fly defeat the Red Menace and his giant robot made from stolen national monuments? Do you see!? DO YOU SEE!?