MFT: William Shatner reads Sarah Palin Twitter Poetry

Making it new with mirroring image

Here's a case study of how to use partial mirror reflection of an image creatively. You just take the right image and tweak it until it clicks. End of story. Here's what happened:

This was originally a visual poem by my friend AA. It was fun but there was a potential of going beyond and i thought it would be a good idea to try to find out its beyond. And so i've started a little offensive on this image. I've tried a couple of image glitchers and filters. It wasn't really working out - the resulting images were crap. And then i've pressed random settings button - and voila! I've got the image i was looking for. It was intense.

Technically, it is just vertical mirror reflection which is no big deal considering how far can you go with such image. But this sole filter was perfectly fitting. It completely transformed the piece to the point i see no reason to put the original image here. In its current form - it is dada-inspired nonsense. It says "Атота Алла" (Atota Alla) which can be interpreted as some placebo magick zaum.

Bullshit: Bullfight in 75 photos

Bullshit: Stones

MFT: That awkward moment out of context

This is a page from "Alice Grove" web-comic by Jeph Jacques. It occurs near the very end of a story as a transition to a definite conclusion. On this page you can see a woman dressed in white skin-tight suit standing in a nondescript place. Over the course six panels she breaks down in hysterical laughter. Background fades to white while she is laughing. By the end of the page she is out of breath exhausted, standing on her knees trying to catch a break in the middle of nowhere. 

I won't give any context for this page because it works perfectly fine without it. This page is very different from everything else in this web-comic. It is completely independent thing-in-itself. It makes a story of its own. The story of a particular moment when the levee breaks and the gut just snaps and it all rushes over. There is no narrative in this story - it merely takes out one particular moment. 

Lack of beginning and end makes this page a fine example of Camus existentialist schtick performed in impressionist manner. As middle without proper start or finish - it is rather thought-provoking piece. You don't need the background to get its point. We all had moments like these: when we just break for a moment. And this abrupt moment of rushing into clarity is often cathartic.

Zur-En-Arrh Transmission - O's 'n zeroes

There is something uncanny in the similarities between the looks of letter "O" and number "0". It is baffling why this thing isn't explored by experimental writers.

So here's my take - a shape poem

***
       0
       o              0
     0
       o  o       -   o   0
       o    0
           0
     o  0
       :         o        0
o      o    0
     :     o  o          0
      o  0
             0
       0
                      0
              0
       0
        0
          o           0
     :         o                  0
          o     0
    0
       0
                    o    0
   o        0
O         0
       0
. . . . . .'  0
     0
  o  oo  0
   o   o     0
     0
       0
   o    0
      0
             0
        o  0
                o  0
o o 0
         0
o    0
               0
oo      o   0.

My own personal punctuation poem just because

My Favorite Things: Hawkman vol.3 #27 cover

This is a cover for issue 27 of third volume of Hawkman comic. It contains everything you need to know about the character. Which - there are multiple versions of the character and it is extremely complicated. It should be noted that i was looking for the cover of #27 for a longer period of time than i was writing this post.

The Best Thing about DC Zero Hour: Crisis in Time

Superhero comics are extremely incoherent. That is the fact. There are no two ways about it. You either live with that or ignore it or try to convince yourself it can be somehow fixed. 

There is a reason for incoherence - let's call it elaborately unfortunate "too many cooks" and "anywhere the wind blows". All these magnificent continuity mistakes, laps of logic, aesthetic inconsistencies, downright narrative contrivances and astounding bouts of cognitive dissonance on every turn - it is pointless to try to make any straightforward sense of it. Traditional rules of narrative are not applied to superhero comics. They can work in the genre but it will make things less interesting - it will leave out one vital element of the genre. 

Superhero comics are not just the stories, they are also documents of certain moments in time when certain decisions were made. Those decisions bleed into the stories. Every stupid thing has a history - someone thought it was a good idea that was beneficial for the business. In the long run it might have been proven otherwise but it is still there - ready to be reassessed. 

Since i've skipped fanboy phase of appreciating comics - i never really perceived continuity clusterfuck as a tragedy. That's why Piskor's "Grand Design" did nothing to me. Even more - after years of reading those increasingly incomprehensible stories - its inconsistency and incoherence had grown on me and soon became its favourite part. I'm leaning towards Grant Morrison's idea that everything is canon no matter what. 

It seems logical - those things were published thus they happened. It might be just bad or simply ridiculous - but it is just a work of fiction and you can turn in whatever direction you want. You can ignore it or you can acknowledge - you can do whatever you want. Nothing really matters in superhero comics except for what is next. 

That is why I never really understood the need to directly address issues with continuity and attempts to fix it inside the narrative. I think reasons behind it are more monetary than aesthetic. Sure, elaborate continuity clean-up provides intriguing narrative opportunities. But it is also extremely lucrative from a business standpoint. 

The following pages are from DC Comics crossover event "Zero Hour: Crisis in Time". It is sad sadness story about how great hero Green Lantern Hal Jordan had gone mad because of a tragedy caused by Superman Terminator Imposter (it's complicated) - his hometown and its citizens were obliterated. Out of sorrow he tried to fix things with his ring. But that is violation of Green Lantern's code of conduct - one can't use the ring for personal gains no matter what. After intense conversation with the higher-ups Jordan snapped and methodically destroyed entire Green Lantern Corps in order to gain enough power to fix things. It didn't worked out. So he united with Green Lantern Corps arch-nemesis and long-time battery Parallax and decided to erase entire universe and start over again. A lot of jumping, punching, screaming ensues. Fallen hero was defeated and gone for good until DC found a way to exploit Alan Moore's legacy even more than they already exploited. 

"Zero Hour" is appaling. It is awful. It is stupid. It doesn't make much sense. There are seeds of good story inside - but it was botched on every turn. There was never an intention to tell a story. It was always about fixing continuity issues with an elaborate swipe. 

But there are four pages that are perfect. They come near the end of the story. Jordan manages to pull his thing off and everything is seemingly gone. It is all blinding white now. There is nothing. It is obvious borrowing to John Byrne's "Alpha Flight" white issue but here it also serves as a glimpse at something that never happened. Jordan disappears in whiteness and after a while some abstract shapes turn up. That is something superhero comics never really tried. Sure there were some development in the 60's and 70's - Doctor Strange and Kirby's stuff comes to mind first but they never really went full-on abstract. But these four pages of a terrible forgettable comic actually go there for a moment. 

And then things return to terrible. But for a moment it is really beautiful.