stripovi

Paul Kirchner’s cult classic comic strip The Bus originally ran in Heavy Metal from 1979-1985. The (anti-)story of “a hapless commuter and a demonic bus” (as Kichner put it himself in a recent memoir at The Boston Globe), The Bus, at its finest moments, transcends our expectations for what a comic strip can and should do. Sure, Kirchner delivers the set-ups, gags, japes, and jests we expect from a cartoon—but more often than not The Bus surpasses the confines of its form and medium. Its protagonist The Commuter is an allegorical everyman, a passenger tripping through an absurd world. Kirchner’s strip often shows us ways to see that absurd world—which is of course our own absurd world—with fresh eyes.

BC: Comic stores can much more easily sell another Star Wars or Batman title. Why should they risk anything on Cinema Purgatorio? Hasn’t the war for “new” been lost?
AM: If the ‘war for the new’ has indeed been lost then there is now, officially, no point to the continued existence of our culture or, conceivably, of our species. If the massive asteroid were to hit us now, it wouldn’t be any great loss. Luckily, I don’t think that the situation is anywhere near as bad as that. I mean, what you’re describing wasn’t really a war, was it? It was more the mass capitulation of a generation or so of creators – or ‘content providers’, to use the current terminology – to the fact that, for the most part, they and their culture no longer possessed the capacity to generate new ideas or to bring those ideas to competent fruition. That’s not a war. Having been born in the aftermath of quite a serious war, I can assure you that there’d be a lot more bombsites, ration books and fondly mentioned relatives you never got to meet. No, a closer analogy to what’s happened to culture is more like if we neglected or worked everybody who actually understood, say, farming to death, replaced them with people who had enjoyed farm produce at one point in their lives and who had thought “Well, how hard could that be?”, and had subsequently seen our entire bio-diverse cultural landscape turn into a barren wilderness that yielded only one increasingly nourishment-free variety of potato. A lot of this might well be related to the ease of modern production methods engendering a certain laziness throughout culture, as mentioned above, but it still isn’t a war if we do not have an enemy except our own complacency and inertia.
And while comic book stores, in the short term, would be much wiser to invest in the latest movie-related spinoff, they might have cause to question how the long term effects of this policy have seen the greater part of the comic industry transformed from a genuine source of fresh ideas and energetic culture into a shrivelling appendage of Hollywood. They might also reflect on a lot of the out-of-nowhere successes of the last few decades, which would have all been occasions where the most sensible thing to do would have been to keep ordering the same steady-sellers and ignore the risks inherent in a new idea or title, even though today’s new ideas very frequently turn out to be tomorrow’s blindingly obvious classics. This was certainly record producer Joe Meek’s philosophy back in the early sixties: when he had a proven number-one hit on his hands with the Tornadoes, why should he risk anything by managing a bunch of unknowns like the Beatles?
Seriously, if the struggle for the new is over, then I wish someone would tell the forces of history, which seem to be propelling our world towards an anxious and uncertain future at an ever-accelerating pace. I’m sure that some of you might have noticed that this isn’t the same planet as it was last year, or even last week. The truth of our situation is that we are being washed away by a tsunami of the new, and by the very nature of its unprecedented novelty we don’t have a clue how to handle it. Thus we stand, gaping, pretending it isn’t happening, engrossed in the exploits of a character we remember from when we were twelve, humming a tune that was popular in the mid to late Seventies. Traditionally, this is what art and culture are meant to instruct us in, and if they have a purpose it is to help us assimilate and deal with our changing worlds, both external and internal. When we were going through the convulsions of the cataclysmic change from agriculture to industry back around the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mary Shelley was able to articulate those new fears and aspirations by inventing the science fiction genre in her wildly avant-garde novel Frankenstein. It is the responsibility of genuine artists to create work which is sufficient to their turbulent times, and in my opinion you cannot accomplish this by continually rebooting and recycling the pop culture of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. How is any new culture – music, films, comics or literature – that is adequate to our modern situation going to emerge if there are all these shiny, re-imagined nostalgia-fetishist franchises standing in the way? Are we doomed to endlessly recycle the pre-digested waste products of the culture preceding ours, passing it on to the culture following us until the end of time? Has The Human Centipede taught us nothing?
The war for the new will never be over until one moment ceases to be followed by the next, and to declare that it is over simply because some creators on the front line have decided that they don’t have the stomach for it anymore, or because they can no longer remember how to load or use the weapons at their disposal, is to ensure that our culture is numbered amongst that war’s casualties, or perhaps fatalities. I have heard it said that there are those among the contemporary audience who feel it is their right to have the characters that they enjoyed as children grow up alongside them (which I think generally translates to “I am not yet ready to give up masturbating while thinking about Catwoman”), but I contend that this can only lead to a menopausal Strawberry Shortcake, Captain Marvel in incontinence pants, and Richie Rich in a nightmarish toupee declaring that Muslims, Mexicans and any other darkly-complexioned peoples beginning with ‘M’ should be prevented from entering America. I think we should ask ourselves if that’s the kind of world we actually want.