You can’t be serious!

Seemingly a lifetime ago, we described the utility of comix as a form of online content. We discussed how the medium didn’t have to be all fun and games, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Well, two developments:

Chris Ware – author of the very disturbing Jimmy Corrigan/Acme Novelty Library comic books, a bonafide genius, and darling of potentates like Chip Kidd and Art Spiegelman – has a legitimate book coming out. What’s he tell Time about the experience of reading comix? Something along the lines of accessible media, actually:
There is something about the medium that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You’re reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It’s a sort of combined activity that I can’t really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.
This is turning into a Unified Field Theory of Art and Content, isn’t it?
Parody is another viable option, but probably not for gutless corporate sites. (No, really. We mean that.) A parody we’re liking these days is TV Go Home, a satire of the venerable Radio Times of the U.K. The whole thing’s rendered as a graphic (accessibility, anyone?), but these people understand the Bruce Lee dictum: Don’t punch, punch through (rephrased by Simpsons head writer George Meyer as “jumping a step”):
- ”9:45 P.M. Bird Brained: Tennis ace Andre Agassi plays a detective whose mind is continually violated by a woodpecker.”
- For a program whose title we won’t reproduce here: “Apparently dressed as a Japanese train guard, Nathan Barley sits in a Farringdon bar watching a bootleg DVD full of Eighties porn trailers on a Sony Vaio PCG-F707 laptop nestling on a transparent plexi-resin table containing scattered fragments of depleted uranium and amusing Spanish keyrings.”

The Onion ain’t the only game in town, folks.

Posted on 2000-09-09