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COMIC BOOKS, or LOOKING AT OUR WORLD THROUGH SCREENTONE-COLOURED GLASSES You still gloss them Children, bound as newspaper stock. Ignorant, you pen the lot in a glut of Anabolic hormones and tights, crotches irradiated with the hatch marks of dynamism, anatomy- barren. The capes, awkward and a Golden Age too small, strangle the voice of these cut figures, domesticized heroes. You think they can only burble, blowing out speech in amusing booms of font – forced ejaculations a spurt of impotence soapy through your public’s plastic wand, a hoop of Wertham’s Code trapping the air of expression in a baser kaleidoscope, these cleansed bubbles. Within the security of societal panels, your garrison mentality, you justify the muting outcry as need to protect the young, the impressionable. The grit, soil of dreams, has not been wiped clean, and with the flood of information, age has pushed us through the tended surface like a backed-up sewer, exposing the world to all its unmentionables, proofs of humanity your societal machine flushes away with polish, ceramic etiquette. In these catacombs we swim, alligators hungry for the light of acceptance, Kirbyesque Mole Men biding time, waiting for some prophetic fulcrum, your Jeremiah of our invasion. Perhaps we stem from a single Crumb feeding the underground with primal imagery – ugly men and women grotesque within the funhouse mirror starkness of his cartooned Western culture, an unretouched cast image. From this, the illustrated squeak of a young Spiegelman’s Raw-words renders biography, a Jewish purge quelled by one’s “natural” order of things, this prejudice of high and low, cats and mice. Slowly the form skitters a subtle subversion, with more surface-artists eluding the easy caption – Moore questions the nature of our watchmen, secret vendetta masked in harmless superhero garb; Miller retaliates against your 60’s Knight’s tale – bat-man campy in tv technicolour, red from the rope burns of Mrs. Manners and censorship – with his own dark fabliaux, a dis-telling of old fableminded myths. Our world and its clowns are now cell-painted over this Frank noir, the perfect sheen for a society’s reflexion – the ink of Goetz, Reaganomics, and Grenada preserved from twisted media, the truth as allegory underneath the Orwellian snouts of critics unable to smell the difference... ...who, like you, look at the cover, a darkened night window, and still see a grown man in tights, poised to fart for your amusement. 2002 -- (c) Frank "damonk" Cormier |