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[Apr. 14th, 2007|04:02 pm] |
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When I started my new science fiction series for comics, DOKTOR SLEEPLESS, I knew that it had to be, for want of a better term, the new TRANSMETROPOLITAN. It needed to be science fiction that was social fiction. This is the grand form of science fiction, the one that comes from Mary Shelley and HG Wells, and, if you want to stretch the point a little bit, Thomas More's UTOPIA and William Morris' NEWS FROM NOWHERE.
The latter relates to the former -- utopia transliterates as both "the good land" and "no place." NEWS FROM NOWHERE was supposedly written as a response to Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD (which has things in common with the Archaic Revival mini-movement of the 1990s) but that title is all about Thomas More.
And this is the great game, you see. The grand form is to use the tools of science fiction as scalpels with which to examine the present-day condition: but all us poor hacks are aware of what came before. And me, I'm haunted by my own work. The great game is call and response. I can't, won't, do Spider Jerusalem again. But, in the peculiar world of comics, a charismatic lead character is demanded to drive the book.
And so, call and response. Spider was defanged by the world's insistence on turning him into a cartoon. The good Doktor (and, yeah, that's part of the game too) pre-emptively turns himself into a cartoon to disguise his actual intentions.
We go through cycles, you see, here in the cultural shithole of the Western world. Sometimes we embrace authenticity. Sometimes we reject it as knowing and insincere. Bono, a man about half as smart as people would like him to be, threw off the Amish hat and black-and-white photography of the 80s to become MacPhisto, all cod-Satanic slicked back hair and fly's-eye shades in the 90s. And when asked why, he said "you didn't like who I was, so I became someone else." But what Simon Reynolds calls the liminal class, the tastemakers and early adopters, were already casting around for CDs wrapped in untreated brown cardboard. Authenticity.
But it swings around. And in 2007, we punish people for being real. Being a cartoon is the only safe way to work.
Even cartoon doctors, however, use scalpels.
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CROOKED LITTLE VEIN: August 2007 |
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