RANT: REVOLUTION 9,
MOVEMENT THE FIRST
BY KEN APPLEBAUM

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About six months ago I was fortunate to be able to attend the reading of Art Spiegelman's musical-in-progress Drawn To Death: A Three-Panel Opera. This three-act show was naturally in a rough state, the biggest sign of which is the fact that there was not yet a third act at the time of this presentation. Such shows might be given for a number of reasons: to gauge an audience's response to the material and from which to glean what works and what they could improve; to start word of mouth about the show so that by the time it opens people are anxious to see it; to interest potential investors in producing it all the way to Broadway. Much of the content had to be inferred from Spiegelman's accompanying multimedia show, which combined images from comic books' early history with original art done to accompany action on stage, sometimes being simply animated in realtime by Spiegelman himself, working on a monitor in the rear.

Spiegelman's intents were plain, if not defined. Drawn To Death seems to be about individual tragedies contributed to, one way or the other, by the events preceding and following the Comics Code's inception. These come by way of the edited-for-legality stories of Jack Cole (creator of Plastic Man) and Bob Wood (one of the crime comic staples) and their joint creation, an anthology series entitled Crime Doesn't Pay. After the Frederick Wertham trials, Cole was able to profit via his tamer creations and alternate channels, going as far as a regular cartoon contributor to the early days of Playboy. Some believe this was his undoing, as he committed suicide for no publicly known reason, though infidelity is suspected. Wood, on the other hand, descended into alcoholism and killed his mistress.

While I am acutely aware of the reading's place in the evolution of a play from creation to production, and I'm not trying to review something that's not done, I should go on record by saying this show will not survive on its wits alone. By which I mean that in such a medium as theater it is never the script (and, in the case of musicals, the music, here written by Philip Johnson) alone that determines its success, and that absolute nightmares of dialogue and plot have somehow run for years on nothing more than pizzazz. (coffkoffMissSaigonkaffahem) This, by contrast, is at least entertaining enough on its own merits. But conversely, it can hardly be said to be enthralling.

What was missing, it's safe to say, is the final appearance of the big-budget musical: actors who've rehearsed for months, dancing, lights, sets, costumes, everything that screams, "Welcome to BROADWAY; how in the hell are ya!" Which is hardly their fault because, well, it wasn't Broadway; it was a church named St. Ann's in Brooklyn.

So I cannot report back to you how Spiegelman is employing his gifts as a storyteller in the comic medium in application to the theatrical arts, because it was only in his roles as a comic historian, an illustrator and a scripter that his work was on display in this show. While any number of interesting technical refinements and stylistic devices might be introduced by the time the lights would officially go up, they were noticeably lacking at this stage.

Like comics, good theater must activate enough of your senses to create an illusory whole, a process known as synesthesia. Used in a non-clinically-psychiatric sense, this refers to the perception of certain sensory information without the physical stimulus that would produce that perception; others might simply think of it as suspension of disbelief, or identification. It is the involuntary drooling one experiences when reading about a sumptuous meal or looking at a picture of a glistening steak, despite the lack of any data having to do with taste or smell being carried to the brain, only visual. It's the sensation of falling when riding a flight simulator, despite being in the same spot. It's when you forget you're perceiving only what you're perceiving and start filling in the blanks.

Thus does Spiegelman hold the unprecedented opportunity to bring some of the mechanics of sequential art to the performing arts, those experiences like theater and live music that you can experience in the flesh. What could he add to a stage that would force his audience to activate the dormant ganglia in their brains used when reading the language of comics? Perhaps sets that double as comic panels, or a transparent scrim at the front of the stage that reflects video-projected animated pages that move between scenes or add the visual or sound effects native to the comic experience. I've never seen a Broadway production of it, but I can't imagine that You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown doesn't contain at least superficial elements of the Peanuts strips and Schulz's aesthetic style.

There is nothing that says the idiosyncrasies of one medium cannot mingle with those of another. As the expectations of those who have continued to read the comic medium into our adulthood have grown more sophisticated, so too has the way in which the medium has been utilized by writers and artists grown. Ellis' dictates for more space devoted to big-screen, Dolby surround sound-style action on a cinematic level; Moore's mastery of scripting the nine-panel grid system to convey naturalistic action and emotional content against a mostly static background without constant, dizzying shifts in perspective; Morrison's adaptation of the writing techniques of revolutionaries like Burroughs and Joyce; Ware's ability to force the reader to abandon instinctive left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading, vestigial from text, instead aiming for a structure he says is more reminiscent of musical composition; Pope's more kinetic fusion of the verbal with the pictoral. Some of the best works of the past 15 years have come about because the parties involved ignored convention and what supposedly you can and cannot do in comics.

Much has been made in the past year or two how the evolution of the comic form will happen with the aid of computers and the Internet, and I don't doubt it. Seeing the sorts of works done online that could have never been done on the static page alone is often enough to make my brain cells divide. Comics are shaking free the shackles of their 20th Century paper suits and beginning to run free. For those of us who always knew in our hearts that they were capable of this, it is marvelous to watch.

But don't for a minute kid yourself that this is the only route they can take, will take, must take. You then only put comics in another intellectual prison, albeit a newer and shinier one.

Let's start, as we must when talking about comics in general, with the printed page. It would seem as though we have tried every technique possible in representing action over time in three-dimensional space using only a string of static, two-dimensional images. There have been comics with 3-D glasses, realistically painted comics, photo comics and computer rendered comics. But try to find more than a handful of any of these types, even in the best of comic shops; odds are that at least 95% of the selection is traditional pen & ink. I grant you, the technical skill of those working in the medium (and here I mean the tools which are used to produce the product) is, on average, higher than at any point previous, and in those books with higher production values the addition of computer coloring, when done well, adds to a more vivid sense of space. Like I said, though, there is little exploration beyond that, so that the vast majority of the product, even outside the dominant superhero genre, looks indistinguishable. The differences and signs of quality are elusive enough to evade even the more conscious connoisseur. Factor in an outsider's preconceptions about the basic content of "funny-books" and small wonder we can't get those stubborn fuckers in the door.

Comics must offer the reader something new to be worthy of patronage. Comics must innovate and diversify, or die. So here's how, and no, this isn't another "screw superheroes" rant.

Any comic whose cover you open you should be presented with something that might stimulate the visual cortex of the brain in a completely different way. There are methods of storytelling using current printing techniques that are just plain being ignored, because they are not readily associated with comics in creators' or publishers' minds. At best, they might be used as cover gimmicks, but even so, the cover is rarely directly part of the story inside.

These are methods like lenticular images, fluorescent inks, pop-up images, non-standard binding, flaps (like event calendars; how seasonal), embedded lights and simple digital displays, polarized 3-D imaging, watermarks, computer code that when fed into BASIC or some other simple, public-domain programming language produces secrets that deepen the reader's understanding of the text... just SOMETHING so utterly different than everything else cluttering the shelves, something that will irradiate readers' corneas, causing large, horribly bleeding ocular ulcers and tumors that put pressure on the speech centers of the brain. And they'd ask for seconds anyway, provided they could still communicate in anything but hoots and schizophrenic gibbers. Alan Moore has been experimenting with such techniques, especially lately in Promethea, but I think Moore himself would be the first to say that such chances should not have to be left to Alan Moore to be taken, and only fleetingly at that.

There's only a few things I've yet mentioned that cannot be done on computers, and that's as it should be. I do not mean to suggest that online comics should not be explored as a new way of enlivening the comics delivery process. But there's still directions that comics can go in that at this stage can only be achieved in physicality as unfiltered, non-vicarious experiences that should rival the visceral thrill of a rock concert, or the serenity and grace of a ballet.

It's easy enough to paint a metaphor between works in other mediums to comics, hoping the merits of one sensation help to sell something utterly different. But what happens when it is no metaphor? What can be added or changed about the standard definition of comics that changes it from a passive recording of words and pictures to an immersive, immediate, individual experience, and in doing so, would such a change cause what you were experiencing to cease to be comics?

I leave it to you to consider that question until our next issue, because I propose to answer all that and more. In fact, I am going to rock your asses cosmic.

Millennium approaches. This is only an overture. YOU will write the symphony.