Talk about these reproductions of older pieces, be they yours at age 12, or using Winsor McCay inIn the Shadow of No Towers...
Well, collage is basic to comics. It's basic to the 20th or 21st century as every screen collides with another on the computer. It's certainly not something I invented. That [LIFE cover] said it all. LIFE magazine was Tom Brokaw cubed. It was all voice of authority in one place. To have that undermined by this incredibly grotesque face, in front of a photograph of some buildings, was smashing realities together. And what MAD did really, really well was calling into question its own means of representation and the basic aspect of what it does. One that scarred me and others was a comic I'll be showing tonight called "Mickey Rodent," by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder. A parody of Mickey Mouse. Kurtzman was the genius behind a new sensibility that still ripples out beyond the Daily Show and elsewhere nightly. This particular well-made comic buy a guy who could do the illustrations exactly the way they looked in the original, but better, that was his forte. Mickey Rodent is like Mickey Mouse, he has stubble, he has rat traps stuck on his fingers, and in the background, the Disney police are dragging Horace Horsecollar off the pokey because he's not wearing the regulation white gloves. Which is exactly like America now, somehow. That was already amazing. But then, as the strip goes on, through its various Yiddishisms and slapstick and great sight gags in the background, thee comes a moment when Darnold Duck has noticed that the background has gotten more sinister, it's shaded differently, and he looks down and points to the signature: look, that's not Walt Disney's signature, that's Will Elder's signature! That's what I mean by calling itself into question. That's a very radical place to be coming from that was barely happening outside the rarefied heights of more modernist literature and painting. We're already in the collage impulse, whether it's drawn by one person or literally pasted in, we're talking about different stylistic textures. And then by the last page it calls the nature of ducks into question because Darnold Duck is trapped in a zoo cage with real ducks, and the zookeeper is drawn like he's from one of their science fiction or horror comics, rather than humor comics. He's talking to the janitor and saying something like, "I dunno, if I didn't know better it'd sound to me like he was saying something like 'Gimme back my clothes!'" And so there's Darnold Duck huddled with these real-looking ducks. That's amazing. I don't even know what the fuck post-modernism means, although I'm told I'm an early adaptor. I think it makes sense in architecture: there it means you've got an art deco Chrysler Building roof atop a Roman colonial home. That I get. When you start talking about post-modern music and comics and whatever, I dunno. It's just more modernism to me.
Early in childhood, you were diagnosed with Amblyopia, which causes you to see the world in flattened two-dimensions.
I'll tell you, it's a bitch when you're getting in and out of cars. You're constantly bumping your head.
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