A few political cartoons

A few political cartoons

Inspired by the Socialist Alliance election campaign I've been creating a few memes.I used my preferred collaging/montage techniques.

Of the cartoons (they masquerade as 'memes') displayed here I created three of them in one overnight sitting. I guess my apprenticeship with Mr Punch is paying off.

Click on images to enlarge view.

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A note on vegetarianism

A note on vegetarianism

People can eat or not eat whatever they want, but...

...the conundrum of the Western diet isn't as simple as  the role of meat consumption. The transition indigenous peoples make from traditional life styles to health impacts of  'Western'  dietary foods is not a simple matter of meat. Much research suggests that a major contributory factor is the density and amount of their new carbohydrate intake. 

The high rates of obesity, heat disease and diabetes (and diabetes is a disease of carbohydrate metabolism) among indigenous populations seem to indicate this (and when they return to traditional foods, health indicators improve sharply).In the case of Aborigines  traditional diets have a larger meat component.(But it is more than a question of meat).

As for plant based being more sustainable I'm not so sure that that is true as agriculture per se is not necessarily more sustainable than grazing or husbandry. Indeed a good portion of the planet -- including the  Australian part of it -- is not conducive to the production of grains or vegetables. (Side example: the American planes were much more sustainable ecosystems feeding buffalo in their millions than growing corn. )

This issue becomes particularly sharp when you have to  work out where fertilisers should come from for us to be 'sustainable' in food. Modern fertilisers are a product of munitions technology and rely on oil inputs. 

Topsoil loss in Australia is consequent not just of over grazing which tends to preserve soil structure  but also of the dissecation impact of agriculture on soils . Aside from the conscious loss of vegetation cover for whatever usage -- Australian soils have suffered under the impact of cloven hoofs. (Native fauna land soft on the ground and don't break up structure). Combine this with over grazing  and the fickle climate with its droughts and flooding rains  and it becomes a challenge to foster sustainable soils and prevent them from blowing away to New Zealand or washing out to sea. 

Nonetheless, the primary problem with the Murray Darling Basin in way of water usage is the irrigation demand engineered by agricultural methods  (and capitalism) and not grazing per se.

It would be more correct to say that rather than not eating meat, planting trees and preserving soils  is a much better route to sustainability. 

Furthermore  it is more appropriate to consider carbon farming strategies  (which apply both to agriculture AND grazing )  rather than plant versus animal  foods.

It seems to me that 'sustainability' and health works best by combining agriculture with husbandry/meat production with plant foods. The nutritional arguments are still being had about how much of this or that is best or necessary... but the whole question is warped by the way that food is produced under capitalism and the way it is 'value added' for consumption and profit.

But no matter which way you look at it, we control neither our environment nor out gut. 

Underlying this, in my perspective, is the long term consequences of grains which have fostered 'civilisation' into being. I think this is the primary dynamic of the 'Western' diet  which has generated a lot of its consequences. The impact of the switch from hunter gatherer  to sedentary agriculture -- from Palaeolithic to  Neolithic cultures -- are pretty clear. It wasn't a good health consequence although it made a lot of other stuff possible -- writing, the oppression of women, class divisions, the nation state...  -- being but a few of its impacts. That's the tragedy which is still writ large on the lives of indigenous peoples who are dispossessed of their cultures and  traditional foods today. 

Furthermore, the contemporary  epidemic of food intolerances and allergies are responses to plant rather than to meat consumptions.  While Lactose intolerance tend to be partly genetic, our guts seem to be suffering from what we consume other than  Nature's foods. This is a confusing question which is not resolved by not eating meat.

I guess my general point is that the key issue isn't so much what or how much protein you put in your mouth but how it got there. 

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The making of 'The Making of a Ratbag'

The making of 'The Making of a Ratbag'

Well it has begun.

After umm-ing and ah-ing for some time I've finally begun composing and pulling together my comicified autobiography.

And it is so hard to do.

It isn't the memory challenge nor the research -- it's what to keep in and what to edit out. How to tell a story -- my story -- with all the boring bits deleted. 

The other task is to decide on who to tell it to: to whom dust thou speaketh?

That helps heaps. It's the voice thing, you see. I'm telling my story to whoever. So I decided it would be addressed sotto voce to my kids. 

I don't need self justification passages. But I need to reference the times. And I need a consistent coherent narrative that would serve anyone doing, say, an eulogy. 

There's a thought: hand out a comic book at the funeral! Deceased limited edition. Maybe that's a business niche I can look at exploring:

FunCom:Comics for Funerals:Death Comics

The irony is that en route I've discovered many stories, most of which I have to bypass. It figures I guess given the amount of time involved in living a life in past tense. 

The way I see it I'm a monologuist and mine is a one man show. Friends, associates, partners and the like are gonna be second fiddle  fodder and most won't crack a mention for the simple reason  that I'm the only one that would care about them. 

I am also the only one 'performing' so I have to do all the characters.

That surely makes the story egocentric, but then that's how we think back in time isn't it? We are always the star of our own show.

...and always on stage, like Mr Punch.

When I began this I thought it would be short and sharp to-the-point comic making but as I map out my composition I realize that this is a much bigger project than I had initially expected. I've worked out all the chapters but nonetheless see that these segments will take many  strips to fill up. 

I either do it that way -- chronologically -- or fall back on discursive anecdotes in the mode of American Splendour. Maybe once I've done it this way  -- got it out of my system and learnt some new graphic tricks en route -- I can go back to particular times and places and explore the context from the POV of a more relaxed story telling with different audiences in mind.

But then I'd be a forever writing my own life story and anchored in a sort of time travel realism.

I'm not so keen on that....

But I wanted to do this, and it's too late now to turn back.

So warts and all, here I come. Blame Harvey Pekar.

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Thus far:

Click on comic image for enlarged view

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Stop Motion is a great start

Stop Motion is a great start

Toyboat.Toyboat.

"Stop motion,where have you been all my life?"

I know I said something like that about comics...but there you go: when you follow your nose you get to  see where it leads.

I don't like a lot of stop motion.Maybe I don't like most of it. But then, I know what I like.

• I like Terry Gilliam's cut out animations.

And I've come across a couple of others that speak to me -- avant garde, independent animators using a range of techniques: 

• Robert Breer
• Yoji Kuri

Here's a sample from Breer, made in 1957 which I really like:

What has surprised me is how easy was my own initial efforts were to do.  I've now packaged these as Punch TV.

There's a few features here worth teasing out.

• I can use the same visual language as I deploy for the comics. In fact one reason I was drawn to cut out stop animation was that I recognized how the comics I did and the techniques I used were reminiscent of  Gilliam's Monty Python animations (and Breer is a Gilliam precursor).
• There's a logic in the process of creating stop animation that suits the panel-by-panel sequencing you follow with comics. I like it because there's no waste -- no fill. You have to be very dense and concise because creating a second of film at , say, 15 frames per second is gonna take you a  lot of time unless you demand visual efficiency from the images you use. And stop motion is creating  a lot of images. A 15 frames per second, say, that's 900 separate images per minute.
• More so than with comics you can play tricks on the viewer's eye and expectations. It's like sleight of hand in the same way that you can animate an object and turn it into a puppet. You have movement as a primary tool to play around with. It's a shell game. 
• The irony is that because stop motion can utilize anything -- and I do mean anything --  to make movement happen  it enriches the possibilities of comic making because you have  a better sense of sequencing without being bogged down in  brutal narratives. Anything is truly possible. It moves because you animate it -- give it life. Absolutely MIXED MEDIA friendly.
• The irony is that my present tools -- especially ComicLife -- make stop animation so darn easy to do. I make the panels in ComcLife then I use Smoovie to create the animations -- and it is ridiculously easy to turn a bunch of images into a video. I hope to get a usb webcam which will enable me to move away from my dependence on the computer screen. ret assured I won't being doing Leggo animations.  They're banned from my desktop.

The Quest

Because I am handicapped by chronic illness which has sabotaged my ability to do theatre, puppetry and sundry other performing artz,  comic making and stop motion are a exciting sedentary substitute in a way that relying pure video, audio,  painting, or photography are not. 

The other plus is thats ince my drawing skills are so shallow and so rusty I can explore other means to make my comics and animations. 

And since my daughter is studying animation at university...

I tell you: it's win, win, win.

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Webcomic Makings :Projects, Possibilities and Stop Motion.

Webcomic Makings :Projects, Possibilities and Stop Motion.

'Mr Punch and Prof Ratbaggy [Emeritus]  is now a 4 months old webcomic, which is surprizing given that I had no idea what I was doing...at all. En route there have been a couple of series -- one on refugees, the other on Fibromyalgia -- and an intensification of the relationship between Mr Punch and the Prof.

All up, over seventy comic 'pages'.

I've skilled up as  I  pursued an eclectic production niche:photomontage comic making. No use of Photoshop (I've banned it, besides I can't do it nor do I own  a copy)-- just a mix of apps/programs. Primary images shot onscreen with an inbuilt camera.

The knack is to work quickly -- unlike the comic making norm where inking and sketching is so laborious. But 'quick' still takes hours to complete. 

Magical hours. 

At the moment I'm exploring crayon on paper as a skill  exercise to supplement  the photomontage effects I rely on.  I need a graphic  tool to  fill the  space where the  digital imagery runs out. I like crayons and pastels because I can work them into 'shape' with my fingers without having to fret over the lines I draw. For me it's like working with clay. Dry clay.

Without going into details, I need to skill up to be able to tackle a couple of pending projects that I'm keen to pursue:

• A study on the Northern Territory Intervention  in comic format.
• A memoir  -- no doubt in many segmented instalments - that turns my own life into a comic excuse.
• An exposition of socialism in  similar mode to Rius works like Marx for Beginners and Cuba for Beginners.

I also want to master stop motion animation...and have a few ideas in mind about that.

Stop motion is easy to do(the way I'd do it -- in fact I have done it) but time consuming and fiddly. A lot of work goes into a few seconds of video time so you have  to concentrate on the important narrative bits. 

Busy. Busy.

I nonetheless need to skill up so that I can tackle the demands of 'editorial' cartooning.  Day to day, ad hoc, graphic political satire demands language skills I'm still working on. So far I haven't felt comfortable with my satiric approaches. The tools I'm using and panel layout I rely on  don't seem to suit.  The complication is that  editorial cartooning  is usually projected in one panel and I want to engineer sequence. That also takes up more space on the page...and journal editors who are always word obsessed, of course,  are notorious space misers: all the words that fit -- graphics are deployed primarily as decoration.

The other bang to my webcomic buck is that I'll be converting my series projects into ebooks, presentations  and other shareable file formats.  For now, with all their black background, they don't suit hard copy.

But hey! If a publisher is out there and wants to talk turkey...

As for site traffic, it's rising...but then I use a combination of three locations online:

• The home website itself: punchratbag.org
• Comic Fury and Comic Rocket
• Facebook

So it's hard to estimate day to day patronage. But a few thousand patrons a month after 4 months of existence isn't bad. 

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You can do so much with comics because that's where it all comes together

You can do so much with comics because that's where it all comes together

Well, that's over and done with.

I finished my latest comic series -- Fibromyalgia for Beginners -- and are primed for another.

It took me just over a month to do the 21 pages on a approximation of an every-second-day work schedule, usually in 3-5 hour shifts.

Compared to standard comic making -- with pens and pencils -- that's fast. I doubt I could work at that normative achingly slow pace. 

I value speed...and shortcuts...and laziness.

En route I learnt a lot of techniques and exposed myself to even more creative options.

So the world is my comic oyster.

While I still have heaps to learn and while I still seek to continue  my chats with Mr Punch (when I'm busy on this other stuff I miss time spent with my puppet friend) , I'm keen to ramp up my comic commitments by taking up more challenging projects.

To mind are the following possibilities:

• A personal political memoir, maybe in snippets
• A meditation on the Northern Territory Intervention into Aboriginal communities
• An exploration of  'socialism' and how to get there (from here) in the mode of Rius' work (eg: Cuba for Beginners, Marx for Beginners)
• I'd also like to get into doing 'editorial cartoons' of sorts...

An experiment in going back in time using GIMP +

The complication so that any of these options present challenges and demand approaches I don't as yet posses or master.

There's also a lot of research involved...before any graphic can be created.

So I'm looking at ramping up my comic work load and committing myself even more assiduously  to the  desktop.  

Nonetheless, I've worked out that distributing whatever I create  requires an eclectic mix of media publishing approaches -- online (both my site and others); via ebooks (by using my present preferred publisher, Smashwords); as presentations (using Slideshare); as standalone pdf files using Scribd...) .

Then there is the other possibility of doing stop animation which I'm sure -- after a time when I've mastered a few more techniques -- will be painstakingly 'easy'. "Easy" maybe given that my daughter is studying animation.

The Scared Little Toaster KIB111 from Anais Riley on Vimeo.

Who woulda thought that after all this time (alive on earth) I'd alight on comics as my preferred and passionate outlet? I'm even gonna start sketching again. 

It shows how confident I am in pursuing the medium. Not how good I am but how much I love doing it.

In the space of a few months -- since late July last, that's just over 3 months --  I've created almost 70 pages, and some of it, I think, is quite good both in graphic impact and/or narrative flow.

I even have fans! One guy, my age, who is a graphic  and comic artist of sorts thinks that my strip "is absolutely brilliant" and friends of mine who are professional artists are extremely supportive.

My advantage is that I'm a tad different from the art school crowd: I pursue a photomontage niche.  Photomontagers I appreciate nonetheless are not as productive as I as they seem caught up in their piece works, whereas I just throw it together.

I'm not looking for kudos, mind. I'd do this no matter what. It is nonetheless strange that some in my network just don't get it. But every time I read a comic -- and I gormandize them -- I marvel at what you can do with sequential art and puffs of talky smoke.

Indeed my whole outlook on life and politics is now being formatted by this panelled and photomontaged perspective. I'm looking at ways -- such as by taking sketching material with me always --  I can work on this stuff away from the computer. In my mind is the notion of doing stuff by hand and then integrating it later digitally. You can scan anything into a computer so that all the sort of Kurt Schwitters  Mertz stuff I love could now be replicated.

The irony is that I find my closest contemporary  deference  within the scrapbooking and journaling communities. 

I can see myself sitting in coffee shops with an appropriate sized Moleskine notebook sketching elements of my panel art.

My partner and I are also discussing how we could convert her Phd thesis into  comic format.... Not so bizarre if you have read  Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth -- an innovative, dramatic graphic novel about the treacherous pursuit of the foundations of mathematics -- or the scientifically detailed, Cartoon History of the Universe.

You can do so much with comics.

The only draw back is that my 'style' doesn't lend itself to printing because my strips would be ink dense and expensive to duplicate. They'd also have to stay printer page small. Maybe as limited editions, perhaps -- for the fam? Another option is a gallery show* if I wanted to go down that route.....but that's just egocentric indulgence.

I'm pretty happy staying online...

So there: it all comes together in a comic for me. 

*I have ready access to a gallery

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Watercolour Crayons for webcomic making

Watercolour Crayons for webcomic making

I'm a lazy artist.Always have been. But then I'm very hands on and into plasticity in a big way. That's why I'm primarily a sculptor.

My background  skills are in bashing puppets and masks into shape.

I'm not into detail. I thump stuff into shape. I appreciate resistance.

So I appreciate  tactile engagement in all of the three dimensions rather the two offered by a page or a canvas.

But since I'm now creating comics....I have a problem.

I employ montage and collage  -- and with these I am skilling up. But it's clear that I often need  a  bridge between the digital paste-ings I select to lay down.

Terry Gilliam discusses this option in his take on how he did his stop animations for Monty Python.

So while I recognized that as a comic maker -- albeit a webcomic maker -- at some stage I'd need to start drawing, I could not work out how I'd do that.

I suspect I now know why but I didn't want to rush into the how.

But then in my puppetry and mask past my colouring and defining tool was crayons. These I'd melt onto the item using heat  as is done with encaustic.

I never used paint.

I love working with colour like that despite the unfortunate penchant I had to burn my fingers. Some of the effects I generated on mask surface were wonderful to behold.

Alive. A handy feature for a face mask or a puppet.

And with  watered crayons you don't have to burn your fingers in search of 'effect'.

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The Beats: A Graphic History

The Beats: A Graphic History

You read this and then the penny drops. It is from the beats that Harvey Pekar got his writing style.

The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar, Nancy J. Peters, Penelope Rosemont, Joyce Brabner, Trina Robbins, Tuli Kupferberg, Paul Buhle (Editor), Summer McClinton (Illustrator) ,Peter Kuper (Illustrator), Mary Fleener (Illustrator), Jerome Neukirch(Illustrator), Anne Timmons (Illustrator), Gary Dumm (Illustrator), Lance Tooks (Illustrator), Jeffrey Lewis (Illustrator), Ed Piskor (Illustrator), Jay Kinney (Illustrator), Nick Thorkelson (Illustrator)

And Harvey wrote real good, engaging dialogue and narrative.

Me, I'm no friend of the Beats. Arrogant self centred poseurs full of their own self importance....but who sometimes happened to write well. I say that because I luv the poetry of Allen Ginsberg....and if the pitch here is correct and the dead hand of Beatdom lasted into the late sixties, then I too am caught up because I was an aficionado of The Fugs.

The story told here is nonetheless a very thoughtful cultural history built around a succession of profiles and as a social documentation of a phenomenon -- no doubt due to Paul Buhle's input -- this is a very useful history which fleshes out and peoples the post war avaunt gardism.

But since so many Beats were macho assholes, Joyce Brabner's graphic essay on Beat "Chicks" reminds us how misogynistic they were.

(What Patti Smith saw in William S. Burroughs I don't know!)

I told you I don't like them, right. Go find heroes elsewhere, says I....

But if you listen delighted to The Fugs or read Howl today , spare me/spare us The Naked Lunch or On the Road . For me though, the context that fostered the Beats into being also encouraged a broader improvisational style of writing, performance and presentation and it is disingenuous to allow the self conscious, self-labeling "Beats" ownership of the copyright.

The stand up of Lenny Bruce, the journalism of Hunter S. Thompson -- indeed so much of the sixties cultural experimentation -- was a Beaty as as any self employed registered Beat professional laid claim to. 

Their source was drugs, jazz and the times that were "a'changin"...not an adding machine guy (William S. Burroughs ) -- in a particular period of a post war economic boom and a pervasive Red Scare.

But if you want to engage further with the Beats and explore their existence -- this comic is a great place to begin

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My comic universe is expanding

My comic universe is expanding

I've been working on my current project Fibromyalgia for Beginners longer than I expected. That's not because of unforeseen obstacles in my path but because I did not plan it out, instead preferring to wing it.

Fibromyalgia for Beginners

I suspect that, after reading Harvey Pekar's comic,  The Beats: A Graphic History ,  winging it -- in 'stream of consciousness' mode (like The Beats did) -- may be comically kosher. Of course you write scripts for comics -- even different people often write the words and story from them that illustrates -- but when you do both I value the improvisational excitement and creativity you get by making it up as you go.

More so now that I'm deploying so much montage.

But I do work from notes and a sort of mind map of the overall. You see I'm seeking a discursive result. The discipline is the form itself -- the number of panels in a page, the necessity to relate pages to each other, panels to each other... and the cut and paste medium.

It's the episodic nature too that formats the way it all comes together. It lends itself to instalments. 

A review I did of Bruce Mutard's wonderful Australian graphic novel, The Sacrifice has been published in the latest edition of Green Left Weekly -- Graphic novel brings old war times to life -- and I have submitted some other comic reviews for publication. So I guess I may be doing more of that sort of writing with a GLW audience in mind.

Bruce sent me a nice note about my assessment outlining his plans for the trilogy of which  The Sacrifice was the first part. 

Hearing how it is done from a master makes my exertions shallow indeed, almost fickle. These things take years to create and I'm expecting to finish my latest project in under two months. Of course I'm not drawing a single line so I'm doing it easy.

But while I do this I pine for my chit chats with Mr Punch so every now and then I have to go talk to the puppet who has en route, developed facial expressions.

Even puppets are not immune to the laws of Evolutionary Biology.

To that end I suspect I may have to take  drawing just a teensy wee bit.

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My chickens have come home to roost.

My chickens have come home to roost.

This isn't off topic.

Following on my from last comments on comic making, I've had the opportunity to explore my POV more actively at the coal face.

I'm now composing another series of strips on my experience with Fibromyalgia.

This autobiographical exercise is  engineered under the influence of American Splendor but without Harvey Pekar et al's street level realism. 

ASIDE: American Splendor offers a very mundane take on the world. It's day to day narrative existence is held in place by  a superb ear for dialogue and considered narrator's voice interventions. That's its strength -- says I , as I work my way through all of the comics in the series.

Go to archive: Fibromyalgia for Beginners

I don't know where my work actually locates itself in way of its form. It reminds me of a monologue ( as in a stand-up narrative) driven by a mishmash of 'offers'/suggestions from graphic items that help drive the story line.

If I was drawing the thing I'd fill each panel with intended art, line by line. I'd have to start composing each panel with a completed image in mind.

It would be rather conventional, by default...and it would take me much longer to create each strip.

But since I'm doing this with photomontage, each panel comes together via found graphics and every time I find an item its further manipulation  is an unknown option until I start fiddling. So the process is layered by this pulling in of mixed elements and aggregating. The photos I take, hold the mix together  and hopefully consolidate the narrative.

What I am doing I actually began doing way back when I was an adolescent. I used to make cartoonish drawings to illustrate science projects and history lessons. I later kept scrap books where I pasted magazine and newspaper cuttings  in the form of collage.

I even collected, cut and pasted a few years of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip...

Over the years I've designed and laid out many political leaflets so I got to  fiddle with images  especially found ones. More recently I've paid my dues as a web page designer...

I've also been a dedicated follower of DADAism and am an aficionado of the cultural explosion during the Weimar Republic (Germany before Hitler).  Think: montage.

So everything I know, everything I've learnt, is coming together in this effort. And that's besides the theatre -- street theatre, cabaret, puppetry, mask making and performance -- background I also rely on as a toolkit.

Why I should contemplate the question of whether anyone else is doing this, I don't know. It has to be rather eccentric...

But hey, I keep looking for like stuff. Nonetheless, my great inspiration is the political cartoons of Mr Fish. I would look at his cartoons and say, "Wow! What a great way to comment!" He uses a lot of self evident montage elements in his work. The Fish got me thinking....what if?

All my chickens have come home to roost.

How good it is, in terms of other peoples' endorsement, is not something that concerns me at all. It certainly appeals to me and I get one helluva kick out of doing this.

That's enough.

Since I began, only in July, I have created almost 50 comic strips although I began without any of my current montage-ing skills and preferences. Now my routine and learning curve are consolidating.

Some panels, in my estimation, are impressive  -- ie: by my standards of what I want or like.

The other interesting feature of this process is the logic of the 'one home', the one comic strip of a set size. The template forces me to actively try to bend the form in order to go where I want to take it. While the formula has its limits and imposes a certain discipline  I am surprized how far I can push this as I learn the graphic language.

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Tag Team politics in the Land Downunder

Tag Team politics in the Land Downunder

Click on comic image for enlarged view

Here's a meditation on electoral politics as a puppet show with  Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott standing in for Punch and Judy. It seems so real despite the jest. Maybe there is a series in it? A horror comic

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Verfremdungseffekt: Mr Punch and the Moslems

Verfremdungseffekt: Mr Punch and the Moslems

Click on comic image for enlarged view

While I'm still experimenting I am trying to tackle more political themes in my webcomic  -- Mr Punch and Prof Rabaggy [Emeritus]. It isn't an easy challenge to explore but I suspect perseverance will win out.

The best thing about this exercise is that I get to manipulate in montage mode and the interfaces I  improvise are exciting to work with. A little bit of snip here and there, some copy and paste, then resizing and positioning....

It's learning a language while making up your own syntax. That I can work 'quickly' with the tools I choose to use means that I am not handicapped by  pretension. There is no best-of-all-possible images -- just the flotsam I can harvest, usually from online searches.

…An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts. …Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. — Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1981)

Years ago I read Ways of Seeing and this essay by the Marxist cultural critic, John Berger , changed my view of 'art' completely. Of course Berger draws a lot on my other fav, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 

Montage for me is the marriage of many of the possibilities flagged by Berger and Benjamin. If what we call 'art' is so readily reproduced in the digital age and shared, consciously remaking culture by recycling snippets of what is already available is  truer of our aesthetic production than we  are willing to own up to.

The other element of this I appreciate is that it locates dialogue up front and centre so that discourse gets to play out by following its own dialectical logic.

My theatre backgrund of course rules my preferences but while I'm a dedicated Brechtian I am also influenced by the perspective advocated by Keith Johnstone in regard to the process of improvisation.

“You ask me where I get my ideas? That I can’t say with any certainty. They come unbidden, directly, I could grasp them with my hands.” 

This may seem a contradictory convergence  -- although 'contradiction' is the driving force of all stuff.  When you start throwing all this  into the same pot with Dada and Constructivism..and Marxism, it has its own sweet logic. 

To me, anyway.

At least that's what I thought -- but I could never quite get my own creative juices in sync with the prospects that seem to be on offer. But when I realized the power of  comics and how comics could be created via montage methods, well, all my Christmases had come at once. 

No need to learn lines or perform. No onerous setting of the scene. No strict narrative form. No arty delusions hiding the tools used. Being both active in the panels  as performer and creator -- while   outside the process and  distanced in the Brecht sense. 

 Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect")

Self evident engagement where the value of the end result is greater than the sum of its many disparate parts.

It was also a bit of shock when I recognized that I could be 'me' (sort of) as though I was  a player in my own repertory company and co-star of my own show. (I thank the example of Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco -- and the autobiographical comics genre -- for that option.)

I could also get this 'me' to work  my own preferred  hours and do all my bidding.

Since I have a commedia dell'arte background (sort of) the logic is sweet: cartoonery characterizations performing skits (albeit in panels on a web page) in empty black space calling up anything -- any tool -- that takes their fancy.

If you do your homework on the theory of montage  you'll perhaps see the possibilities.

What I get is this great synthesis to play with and explore. But the irony is that unless you have done Improv and fiddled with photomontage you may miss the argument I'm trying to make. This isn't about the digital powers of Photoshop (which I do not use) because  I'm not striving to reproduce reality seamlessly by manipulating images to pretend that they are original or arty. It's more snip 'em and slap  'em together rather than anything else. Discordance rules and has to be seen to rule.

It's like a digital pin board and John Berger said this about them.

“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”- Ways of Seeing, John Berger

But then I could go on and on and maybe discuss Merz but then, that would be like opening up a can of worms...

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Ideology Webcomic

Ideology Webcomic

Click on comic image for enlarged view

I won't be posting all of my webcomics here but I will share the ones that have a relevant topic. My hope is to do more 'political' ones like this and slowly move into more frequent editorialising. 'Tis all a matter of practice and experimentation. While I am in transit to a new domain, the webcomic series --  Mr Punch and Prof Ratbaggy [Emeritus] -- lives here.

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Montage a go go

Montage a go go

Montage by Philippe Jusforgues

So there's me, right, playing around with my snip and paste trying to make comics -- montage comics -- when I  thought I'd go Google a bit.

"Montage"

So I come upon this simply great site -- collageart.org -- which is a sort of montagee's wet dream.

resources. resources. 

So you don't have to go back to Russia and Constructivism or wallow in cultural edginess of the Weimar Republic. You can  get your  fresh produce montage fix online any day... 

The galleries linked to by collageart.org - are all fantastic examples of the magic...and I now feel not so alone as I did. Montage like this may seem, in the light of the whiz bang of Photoshoppery, all very old hat, but the  real clincher for the form is the  ready merging of contradictory elements. It's scrapbooking of whatever takes your fancy because digital is at home with its kind.

It's not a "Sur-real(ity)" because  it is very much closer to DADA and Constructivism. Nor is it essentially sentenced to what may have once been printed.

It's like Rap/Hip Hop -- sampling stuff to make new stuff. But the thing I appreciate is that with this sort of montage -- esp much photomontage --   the means used is self evident.

And here's a surprize: my own work is going to be linked to from collageart.org.

From my recent webcomic.

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Girt by Sea (webcomic completed)

Girt by Sea (webcomic completed)

I've finally completed the conversion of Girt By Sea into a web comic. It now lives online here .

The exercise was challenging but it pushed me to explore a range of  different approaches in order to tell it the way I'd hoped. While the sequential imagery was handicapped because of its genesis as a sound play, I nonetheless discovered a range of montage techniques which  made the project exciting to pursue.

My comicifying confidence has risen sharply. I may be creating photo comics but I'm also handling my materials as  photo montage. 

It's like all my Christmases have come at once.I've been absolutely smitten by the work of  John Heartfield and co(history of photomontage) for decades and now I'm developing the photo manipulation  techniques that may enable me to do in like mode. I also suffer from a groupie obsession with the collages of Kurt Schwitters...

The results may look 'messy' but if it looks like the graffiti wall at the local railway station, that's they way I like it.  

Girt By Sea from Ratbag Media


Afterward:

So now the world is my oyster.  In pursuit of  inspiration I watched the film, American Splendor tonight (again) which is about Harvey Pekar's contributions to the genre of non fiction biographical comics -- American Splendor being a comic series about his own mundane existence.  That he started writing comics initially by working with Robert Crumb  is a tad disconcerting as I have never ever been a Crumb fan, despite my 60s background  and  my penchant back then for Underground Comix.

But my mental cogs are whirling...big time.

I suggested today, semi publicly, that my next 'political' project could be a webcomic about the Northern Territory Intervention.  I also suspect that I can comicify my long held intention to generate a sort of Fibomyalgia Survival Manual, drawing on my own, everyday, experience of the condition.

In the meantime Punch and Prof will keep me working at the coal face  and I'll use that to see how far I can push the boundaries and explore my creative options. 

I think I am onto something -- a limited toolbox it may be but there is enough there to sustain a few projects, if I keep working on my photomontagery, my graphic editing skills and my  photography.

I'm thinking I'd really appreciate a IPad #2 with a PhotoBooth ap so that what I do on my desktop I can do out and about.  That way I can look at the image  of myself plus what or who ever while I'm shooting it.  For now I need to explore and master the  skills for  composing photoes (with me in them) using my camera's self timer.

Another option may be to use my cheap pocket video camera set to still mode ...

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