Material by Ales Kot, Issues 1-3: Acceleration and its discontents

Material is a comic by Ales Kot, a doe-eyed young man 28 years of age, who has of late injected such a massive amount of enthusiastically bizarre ideas into the industry that he’s being heralded as one of its most vital modern voices. Ales Kot also pens The Surface and Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier, and recently wrapped up Zero, all of which are overtly cerebral comics, rarely simple, and always aiming to open your eyes to some new and glorious strangeness. Kot very obviously gets a lot of satisfaction out of confusing people by saying several things at once, be it through subtext or panel content. He loves to stir up chaos with his words, and he’s damn good at it.

From the very outset, though, Material isn’t chaotic, and while it says many things at once, it is more overtly simplistic than any of Kot’s other writing. Material is utterly structured. The book tells 4 alternating stories, always in the same order, two pages at a time, three rotations per book, totaling 24 pages per issue. Each story chugs along on a 3 x 3, nine panel grid. Additionally, the stories have their own color schemes, providing instant familiarity at each transition. This is comic book formalism, and it makes for a story that feels slower and more contemplative than anything else Kot’s been putting out. It’s also entirely based in reality, our reality, our time. The Black Lives Matter movement and American torture programs come into play, as well as references to recent pop music hits and contemporary activists and writers.

In his interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kot remarks that with Material he wanted to be, above all, honest. “As I go through therapy,” he says, “and an overall complex process of shedding behavioral patterns that I no longer want in my life, my path becomes clearer. With Material, I am primarily interested in people and poetry. What I am decidedly not interested in is genre and false conflict. I want to explore what it means to be alive, in America and out of it, now.”

We get the impression, from this interview, that Ales Kot has suffered a bit of disillusionment with the strange, the incomprehensible, with the fantastical. We can certainly feel general disillusionment in the characters he’s writing: Julius Shore, the bored, aging postmodern professor whose faith in his own convoluted theories has been disrupted; Nylon, the actress with a sordid past begrudgingly and doubtfully playing along with the male director who’s taken an interest in revitalizing her career; the black rights protestor, Franklin, who struggles to maintain faith in social progress even while he suffers detention and extortion at the hands of a purported police officer; and Adib, a former Guantanamo prisoner who cannot escape the trauma of the torture he experienced. Each character is fleshed out through conversations, and through many sequences of wordless panels that make Material such a quiet book.

Professor Shore is threatened by a mysterious individual who claims to be an artificial intelligence program. The A.I. proceeds to troll professor Shore so hard he has to start revert to wearing band t-shirts and wearing dynamite on his head during a lecture.

Material comes together like a movie from the French new-wave in the 60s, a movement that itself attempted to reflect its time using realism and honesty. Will Tempest’s illustrations lend muted realism and immediate personhood to each character that enters the panel, and the lettering by Clayton Cowles hangs back and allows the words to say what they needs without embellishment. Tom Muller, who designs the covers and interiors, has a bold and simplistic style that emphasizes text over image. Reading through Material, you can see exactly what Ales is talking about: it’s about people, and the poetry they're living out. There's no teenagers fighting their way through a surrealistic hellscape, no spies being plunged into Lynchian nightmares. It’s just people and their reality, our reality.

That being said, the themes being touched on are not at all dissimilar from the themes Kot’s crazier titles talk about, but for the simpler tone and more realistic, straightforward style. Things like accelerating technology or government brutality and the search for real human connection in the face of an oppressive and uncontrollable larger society are more than prevalent in other works by Kot, but being dressed in science fiction and fantasy pushes those themes into the subtext.

Adib comes home from a night trying to escape his wife and his past. A mix of vivid and desaturated colors all throughout the book gives the action an cohesively understated feel.

Material is where Ales Kot goes to slow the fuck down from his usual output. He’s taking his time writing character studies, and he clearly wants us to study right along with him. Footnotes at the bottom of most pages offer potential points of divergence, a book or song or idea that strengthens the impact of what just occurred, begging by virtue of its esoteric understatement to be Googled.  At times it’s just a helpful quote, like Susan Sontag waxing philosophical about the fear of getting old, or George Orwell reminding us that the personal is political. Other times Kot tells the reader to go Google some concept or neologism, like “wyrd” or “Homan Square”. This device is used most devastatingly for Franklin, whose innocuous African American boyhood is more often than not underscored by footnotes listing a seemingly endless stream of names of black men and women gunned down by police.

Franklin seeks empowerment in a society that feels engineered to repress him, his family, and his friends. His efforts towards making positive change lead to a dangerous and inescapable situation. 

Material refuses to ignore the outside world. It points outward again with the essays at the end of each issue, chosen personally by Ales because he respects them, because they speak to him. The essays are phenomenally written reflections by writers most won’t recognize but who are nonetheless undoubtedly talented. They are wittily written and enticing perspectives on topics like political detention, the objectification of commercial femininity, and the academic ivory tower, themes present all throughout the series. Between the footnotes and the essays it’s obvious what this book wants from us: to read and watch and listen and above all think about the problems we’re faced with as a society today. “Material,” he tells The Gaurdian, “[…] is my way of staying sane in a world where these patterns and systems are still very alive, and it’s also a part of my way of working towards breaking these patterns and systems apart and building something new and better instead."

Nylon's movie producer mansplains the problem with redheads to her. Her character seeks to reconcile a harsh past and a desire for voice with the fact that whatever voice she is allowed to have must be on a man's terms.

We live in accelerated times, and in a severely outdated civilization. The internet information explosion has amplified our voices and served in many ways to organically filter truly important news from propaganda and corporate non-stories. It’s also shined a light into the depths of our depravity and inhumanity, and it’s paradoxically made it easier for corporations to sneak their way into our consciousness with viral advertising. It’s easy to be giddy about the prospects for change such an immediately transmissible medium offers, easy to fall into the old accelerationist trap of thinking that this brand new means of production, which was initially developed for war and then distributed for the sake of commerce, will in itself help us topple and conquer the status quo, if only we would grab the reigns tight and crash it through the palace gates. Right now it feels like too much too fast. Professor Shore frames the problem in good old fashioned postmodern terms at the end of his opening diatribe in Issue #1:

“There is now no single authoritative voice on history. Instead there are billions of voices overlapping, and in the confusion of their songs, we can hardly discern our own voice. The maps in our hands no longer match the territory – and perhaps they never did. Now what?” 

This technology has to an extent deepened our schizophrenia and narcissism. It’s hard to see the real world, because we’re busy gathering moments from it, collecting flashes of life to add to the digital scrapbook (a cute cat video here, a #Blacklivesmatter protest picture there) while ignoring our actual physical agency and potential in the real world.

“Now what?” An essay by Bruce Sterling, titled “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” is footnoted on that page and hints at an answer. Sterling, being an atemporal jerk himself, doesn’t offer a clear definition of what he means by atemporality, but implies that it’s a way of dealing with history and social problems that doesn’t try to pin it down to a single story or solution, but instead collaboratively and digitally filters and evaluates components through a myriad of perspectives and processes. The atemporal historian has conversations and tinkers with datasets simultaneously, using technology and that vast social media forum to confront a social problem as a living and breathing entity, existing fluidly in the here and now.

In similar fashion, Ales Kot is providing waypoints for the broader context of the book, effectively linking us to tutorials on remapping the world. In its persistent concern with the now of our existence, Material is constantly attempting to push us out of the book and back into the very information storm we are ostensibly trying to escape from, urging us to find the voices that speak to us, just as he presents us with the voices that have spoken to him. He tells The Guardian about his intentions and inspiration, how “the best fiction, to me, educates and entertains at the same time. It brings awe and it leaves us richer than we were before. Sometimes it feels as if it’s reminding us of something we already knew, but forgot a long time ago, and now, with its help, we are remembering again."

He continues: “There’s so much more to it: the way a book or a painting resonates through me without my understanding why, seeing people replay ancient myths in real time without even knowing it. There’s a reason why the Nazis burned books. They’re powerful.”

More specifically, words are powerful. When mixed with real social concerns and a bit of faith and enthusiasm, it can start revolutions. It’s obvious what the world needs: Strong voices, thoughtful words. It needs linguistic cartographers handpicked by the mass disenfranchised collectively creating a mental and emotional roadmap for this insane new world we’ve stumbled dizzily into. In that sense Material tells us how to go about it: to read, to write, to listen and discuss, and above all to take the time to contextualize and restructure. It’s one way out of the digital tarpit: steady, structured, and honest words.

Lastly I'd just like to link another good interview with author Ales Kot, this one done in Vulture magazine. A great read if you have an interest in finding out more.

Nietzschean Mutations by Dromsjel

"Drømsjel" means “dream soul” in Norwegian. It’s the moniker of Pierre Schmidt, a German born digital artist who takes the vintage 1940s and 50s advertising aesthetic to heady and surrealist place. Dromsjel fucking loves to rip people's faces off.  Then he replaces them with wild flora and fauna: flowers, lichens, fungi, parakeets.  The faces are straight from magazine advertisements, but the wildlife illustrations are encyclopedic, scientific illustrations. He melts it all together using a mixture of collage, illustrations and digital blending. His website claims his work is “partly inspired by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who challenged ideas about individuality and the meaning of our existence”.

Dromsjel has been kind enough to provide us with before and after images of his modifications, walking us through the face ripping process. 

Why does Dromsjel hate makeup so much? Why is a rainbow waterfall on this lady's face so much better than Revlon's revolutionary "demi-textures"? I feel like it would help to look into Dromsjel's purported influence to figure it out. I need a quote, but I'm not a Nietzsche scholar, so... 

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Thanks Wikiquote.com, that'll do fine. 

Advertisers are mathematicians of desire, calculating images with the perfect ratio of beauty and mass appeal. The subjects are ideal, especially in all the older magazine ads. Scientific illustrations, likewise, want to get as close to an ideal form as possible, that which was provided by nature upon observation. But nature hates a straight line, like our buddy Nietzsche knows. Maybe that's why it sometimes feels like a perfect thing is begging to be broken, just because it's so perfect. Think of cute aggression, those kittens and puppies so cute it that internally they make you want to bash something against a wall. I think Dromsjel can relate. In his images recognizable perfection has been invaded and reshaped by a contagous hyperactivity. He saw this perfectly illustrated parakeet and this hip young couple on their motor bike, and he thought "FFFFUCK SOMEONE NEEDS THEIR FACE RIPPED RIGHT THE FUCK OFF."

So, there is a sense in which these pictures are utterly violent. They look like awful new creatures from a planet where boundaries have trouble respecting each other. Nietzsche is relevant here too, because Nietzsche loved vitality, and knew that the true power of life was in it's ability to overtake, to grow, to remain vital in the face of mediocrity. These advertisements are begging to be infected with life, because they represent compromise with the masses, with mediocrity. 

You can enact the Drosjel philosophy, as I see it, by going out today or tomorrow (no later, please) and looking at every thing you see, from hottest hottie you see walking down the street, to the pigeons waiting for you to drop crumbs from your sandwich at lunch, to the subway train that's getting ready to take you home -- imagine each thing in existence has a personal agenda as well as the potential to utterly change you and be changed by you. Do not go around stuffing chrysanthemums and finches people's faces. You will be punched. Stay in your head, and imagine how much different you would be by the end of the day, after having had everything you pass try to actively invade you, it's vital energy interacting with and fighting with your own in a day long argument with a multitude of participants, natural and unnatural, sentient and non-sentient. That's the struggle of life that Nietzsche believed in, and that's illustrated in Dromsjel's images. 

You could say that, in these images, consumer culture is being dismantled and re-purposed in order to expose the manipulations of capitalism, but there's no need to be such a college socialist about it. He's just creating beauty from dead left over beauty, from artifacts that have no ability to fight back any more. Dromsjel is recycling, re-energizing and building upon images that still have a little vitality left to wring out. These ads, the drained ephemeral left overs of a previous generations' consumer culture, are now historical artifacts, obsolete tools for an old machine. Likewise, the old necessity to illustrate the natural world in order to spread knowledge of it was filled by photography. It's largely a dead art, but an art nonetheless. All that's left of these tools is that flat beauty, which Dromsjel rejuvinates with visual commentary. It doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like a party is breaking out on the surface of these familiar, now cliched figures and fashions. He's like a medium. With his manipulations and alterations, Dromsjel is having a lively visual conversation with the dead.  

 

Even the obsolete has value when it's dismantled, invaded, rearranged. It's how flowers grow, from the rot of what came before. Remember how tenacious life is, how much bigger nature is than you, how it's going to keep fighting against you, and how you need to fight back and not stand there like some jerk off on a moped in an advertisement selling a life that isn't real. The bland need not be bland so long as you're alive to perceive it and ballsy enough to impose your specific weirdness onto it. There's always the excitement of the act of perceiving, and the desire to interact, to let the party going on in your head play with the party going on outside, to perceive actively, without dead time. Why let perfectly good leftovers go to waste? 

Review: Virtual Candle by Grant Gronewold (aka HTMLflowers)

Fort Thunder ended more than a decade ago, can you believe that? For those who don't know about it, Fort Thunder could loosely be described as an art-hive / music and event venue started by Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, located in an old textile factory in Providence, Rhode Island, which fed off the creative juices and dollars of the legendary(?) school of design. Fort Thunder put on concerts, wrestling matches, noise dance parties, all that, but a huge part of their scene was the visual art and sensibilities of Brinkman and Chippendale (of Lightning Bolt fame), which drenched each event in iridescent neo-fauvism and expressionism. Eventually other artists started living and working there, and a community blossomed that had a lasting impact on contemporary visual design probably, can't say I'm an authority on these things. Let's look at the names: Brinkman, Chippendale, Paper Rad, CF (via Paper Rad), Ben Jones. Go look up more, I can't do all your homework for you.

Add Grant Gronewold (a.k.a. HTML Flowers) to the list by proxy. Though coming along well after that scene was done, Gronewold obviously ingested large doses of those artists as a child and now speaks that language natively, and he uses it to make irridescent visual poetry. His first official collection is called Virtual Candle, and is out and ready for purchase from Spaceface Books

Mr. Gronewold has this way of making art and comics that is both deliberately unpolished and highly refined. Lines, colors, characters, nearly everything is held together by unfinished or deformed yet recognizable shapes, and the rest is carefully placed in the wrong places. These deliberate fuckups and incompletes are actually the most sophisticated aspect of his style, because through them you feel like Gronewold is not only admitting to his imperfections, he's making triumphs of his mistakes.

Both the art and the writing can seem like nonsense, but I assure you it speaks to personal emotional and psychological truths. The combination of deformation and imperfection makes it at once unabashedly sincere, poetic, and moderately to severely ridiculous. The first few sections of the book, for instance, are comics about "The Twins", a pair of unidentifiably fuzzy humanoid creatures who go on crude and childish adventures through nature and society. They piss on trees and in rivers of sorrow, poke the moon with sticks, etc. They say "dude" a whole lot. According to an interview with It's Nice That, The Twins is one of the the artist's favorite parts: "They're avatars for me and my closest friends and adventures we've had or ones we should have had".

The Twins section feels like filler, but it provides a decent introduction to the artists overall outlook on life. These Twins comics are classic stoner nonsense: poop jokes and joyful stupidity. It's great if you're into that kind of thing.

When Grant puts his emotions on the page and combines it with that radiant Fort Thunder energy the effect is powerful and intimate. Grant has cystic fibrosis, and like the more than 30,000 other people in the States with this condition his life came with a rather short expiration date. Imagine a doctor telling you they know when you're probably going to die, telling you and your family to prepare for the worst if treatment doesn't work out. Today, with regular (but often brutal) treatment, CFers often break through several life expectancies, each time being told their clock has a little more time. Speaking specifically about his stick and poke tattoos, Gronewold says that doing them for friends and fans allowed him to "regain some kind of control over my body" while coming close to his third life expectancy. 

With intense emotions and something to actually say, the Fort Thunder / Paper Rad / Whatever aesthetic of color and simplicity and childishness can be devastatingly intimate. The most important thing about Grant Gronewold is that his style and his emotions are completely entwined and you can feel it on the page and on his Tumblr. There is no pretension. What may seem to some as affectation is really just Grant speaking how he learned to speak. 

And yes, I said stick and pokes. Grant apparently let a few brave individuals live out their wildest dreams of letting a Tumblr-famous weirdo repeatedly stab them with a sharp ink-laden object, and included a bunch of pictures of the results in this book. This is as intimate as it gets short of someone getting pregnant. Grant, speaking on his tattoo work, had this to say: "I can’t believe people let me mark them forever. Crazy ding dongs!" He's being modest. His stick and poke drawings have the same intelligent naivete as his comics and traditional drawings. 

I'll leave off with some random images from Grant's Tumblr, because that's how I first found him and also because I can't bear to break the spine of this book to scan  more of the awesome drawings in it. Hopefully you'll enjoy them as much as I have over the years. I also highly recommend reading that interview with Grant by It's Nice That, so you can get to know the artist more in his own words. 

The Gronewold himself

That Catastrophic Aesthetic

Photo by Adam Wallacavage, taken shameless and without asking from his instagram page

I really tried hard to figure out what beers to buy on my way home today. I planned to write a review of some comic, and having suffered through the eight hour first world problem that is a busy tuesday at work, I needed something to slow my thoughts down enough to grab them. I wasn't keeping track of the weather. I didn't take note of the massive wall of doom in the sky over Philadelphia.

I made it to Beer Heaven, yes that's what the beer store is called, in time to make getting out of the car a small act of bravery. I drove from sunshine New Jersey to hell-sky Pennsylvania in 30 minutes, and by the time I was at the last stretch to Heaven I saw the air turn grey and evil, the leaves lift from the ground and spin in clouds across everything, and heard the wind roar. Then the torrents of rain started. Huge globs of rain. Since I'm so brave I parked and ran in and out of Beer Heaven as the Gods pissed down upon me, knowing now that I would need at least one bottle of Victory Storm King.

Deptford, New Jersey, where car-flipping hell broke loose

I've had a couple apocalyptic dreams the past couple weeks and I'm on this weird end of the world kick. All I could think was: this is it. This is where I begin to hate myself for not stocking up on guns and canned beans and survival tactics. I'm dumb and I'm also an asshole, because apparently half a million people are without power because of this storm. Trees were downed, shingles were torn. A fucking car was flipped over at a mall I used to go to as a kid, all because of the gusts from this freak 30 minute storm. I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up tomorrow and it was more devastating than is now apparent. Hoping for the best.

Somehow I didn't notice this on the ride home

At one point, around sunset, I get a text suggesting I look out the window, and I do. The whole city had turned orange from the moisture in the air catching the sunset and spreading it all over. I rushed to put my pants back on so I could go see what the world looks like after the apocalypse. I was not disappointed. Never has golden hour been so gold.

I saved a bunch of pictures I found of this massive orange sunset from a group I'm in on Facebook. The last two are my own, taken while roaming the street, belly full of Storm King, feeling orange and astonished.

3 Items for a Monday

Horror brought to you by dreaming search engine servers

It's Monday, but don't worry about it, it's almost over. And there's been some exciting developments around the world and across the solar system that may reaffirm you're faith in the value of being alive all weekdays, Monday included. I'm going to list some now, but if you don't feel particularly inspired by them I refute any responsibility for your continued hatred of the work week and the rest of existence.

Item 1: Vintage Science Fiction Magazine Omni has been released on Archive.org

Founded in 1978 by co-founders Kathy Keeton and Penthouse publisher Bob Giuccione, Omni Magazine was a monthly collection of science news, science fiction, science speculation, with some spiritual / paranormal fuckery mixed in for finishing. This publication had consistently on-point cover art, original fiction by some of the most famous names inside and outside of genre fiction, and a hedonistic enthusiasm for the bizarre future they knew would soon devour their culture. They were the original publisher's of stories by William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, William S. Burroughs, and also had a hand in popularizing H.R. Giger's paintings.

There are a lot of issues up, and I barely had a chance to look at any of it. Topicly they can be everywhere, but the same theme pervades: the psycho-social effects of knowledge and technology on our fragile little societies. I need to take a day and a six pack to look through it as much as possible. Who knows what kind of tech-anxieties and science dreams we've forgotten about that are waiting there for us to find again.


Item 2: We landed a thing on a fucking comet seven months ago and that shit's finally working!

I'm using "we" very lightly so you can feel like you did something. You didn't do shit, and if you're in America or any other non-European non-member state (with the exception of Canada) you did even less. This comet lander was the product of the European Space Agency, or ESA. To ensure conspiracy theorists have enough to occupy their time, the lander was named after an ancient Egyptian obelisk which, along with the Rosetta stone, helped humanity understand what the Egyptians were saying with all those little pictures.

It's news because one: The spacecraft didn't land where it was supposed to land, bounced a couple times and almost escaped the comets gravity altogether, then fizzled out of functionality for 7 months, before waking up a couple days ago fully functional and ready. Before it fell asleep it took some amazing pictures of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from a distance. I remember seeing these ominous photos a while ago and being amazed, and then being devastated that it looked like the mission was an almost complete waste due to a crash landing. So it's an inspirational comeback story.

And because two: As far as we can tell no one has landed on a comet before. That's important somehow. Here are a couple of those beautiful pictures:

Item 3: Better bullshit through technology

Have you ever wanted to invent a story and make it reality? Of fucking course you have, man. Thanks to flash-research in the age of Wikipedia and Google, you can almost sorta maybe do that, if enough people don't have the resources or interest to look into the facts. Yes, it happened, according to this article in The Kernel.

In 2002 a couple of movie nerds, haggard from from a day in the film industry and perhaps knocking back Belgian trippels at just the right pace, invented a man, a maniacal film director who's methods were toxic to his film crew's psychology. Their names were Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker. A venting session at a Belgian restaurant (in London) turned into an 11 year journey to turn this fictional psychotic director, dubbed Yuri Gayudkin, into a historical fact using Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and any other internet information channel available to them. Their hoax was so convincing, that a completely unassociated hopeful playwright was getting ready to pen a script about the entirely fictional auteur. He wrote to the author of a blog about Gayudkin, who was a friend of Boyter and Ducker, asking for more facts about Gayudkin, as "information is really sparse on the web." All of the information he needed was of course lodged firmly in Boyter and Ducker's asses.

Feel better yet?