[Go and read Charles' post first, because I'm not going to make any sense here.]
1. Soon after 9/11/01, in an interview with the Associated Press, film director Robert Altman argued that the World Trade Center catastrophe was caused in part by Hollywood. Altman said, "Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie...how dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies? I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it." How--and how much--do the dreams and nightmares of popular culture influence both individual behavior and the macro-shifts of history?
2. Frankenstein's Monster is the enduring symbol of mad science, of Enlightenment hubris eradicating--with unforeseen consequences that would become cliches in later Universal and Hammer horror flicks--the God-given distinction between death and life. How appropriate that Geoff Grogan has the Monster haunt the trenches of World War I, those scars in the landscape (echoes by the scars on the Monster's limbs?) that represent guns, flame-throwers, mustard gas, and more science-gone-wrong.
3. Where's the place of morality in No-Man's-Land? How many churches burned in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Iraq? And of the churches that remained standing: who cares? The superego principles they represent are ineffectual at best and repulsive at worst: the cognitive dissonance between religious virtue and the parade of atrocities that characterized the twentieth century sickens us all. Max von Sydow in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986):
You see the whole culture. Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers, beauty contests, a talk show. Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling? But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third grade con men telling the poor suckers that watch them that they speak with Jesus, and to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.
4. Why can't we stop thinking about sex? Like characters in J.G. Ballard novels, why do we endlessly dream about the erotic couplings created when a wall and a ceiling meet? Is everything sexy? Does that include my beloved Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four comics, which boil over with pretosterous (preposterous + testosterone) property demolition, phallic symbols, and Galactus, a character who fan writer Jim Engle once described as "that big boy in the majorette costume"? In Look Out!! Monsters, Grogan distills this libidinal power down into a single panel, reproduced in Charles' post: we see Johnny and Crystal kiss and a rocket superimposed over the image, while we read out-of-context, typically florid Lee dialogue about the throbbing of a "strange kind of energy." Is that Kirbytech in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
5. Are Kirby dots sperm? Can Kirby Krackle leak and cry?
6. What are the monsters in Grogan's world? In our world? The back cover of Look Out!! Monsters is a collage of images torn from fashion magazines, particularly women in supplicant poses, their lips bleeding red, their images surrounded by bottles of red nail polish and tubes of red lipstick, red like menstrual blood, like the blood that collected in pools in the trenches at Ypres. When Invisible Girls start to become visible, start to throb with their own strange kind of energy, do they become monsters?
7. One of the most famous capsule descriptions of surrealism is from the Comte de Lautreamont: "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table." Is that anything like the deliberate encounter of a building and a hijacked plane on a nation's unconscious? Don't both the sewing machine/dissecting table combination and WTC/flying bomb juxtaposition speak to our irrational selves, threatening to unleash personal and collective Ids? Can we capture such surreal irrationality in comics? Geoff Grogan gives it the ol' collage try (nyuk nyuk), culling and detourning newspaper clippings and his most cherished childhood pop cult images in a mad, passionate, intensely personal attempt to diagnose just how fucked up we've been these past seven years. Little Geoff sat in front of the TV watching Bela Lugosi movies on Shock Theater, hosted by Ghoulardi; big Geoff watched Shock and Awe Theater instead, hosted by Butcher George, and began to imagine the guards at Guantanamo Bay affixing a spike-lined mask over Barbara Steele's face. This image became Grogan's muse, and Look Out!! Monsters is the result.
8. A paradox. Grogan's previous comics strike me as competent but uninspired--Nice Work is never more than nice work, though its love of Sinatra-era retro points to the later iconography of Look Out!! Monsters--but when Grogan turns more to collage, to pre-fabricated images, he becomes an artist. Grogan makes the Mazzucchelli move here, shifting away from well-trodden visual idioms to his own way of seeing the world (though still inspired by Karloff and Kirby, Schwitters and Stan Lee). I love it. More of your fever dreams, please, Geoff.
9/11. Two quotes (how I would push my fingers through your mouth to make those muscles move):
There are no real substitutes for anything, even the crudest goals continue to draw us on, and even though our instincts are quite flexible, they are also merciless and their memory for the few objects that really matter to them is indestructible. [Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies]
Let art continue to be entertaining, escapist, stunning, glamorous, and NATURALISTIC--but let it also be loaded with information worked into the vapid plots of, for instance, movies. Each one would be a more or less complete exposition of one subject or another. Thus you would have Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh busily making yogurt; Humphrey Bogart struggling to introduce a basic civil law course into public schools; infants being given to the old in homes for the aged by Ginger Rogers; donut-shaped dwellings with sunlight pouring into central patios for all, designed by Gary Cooper; soft, clear plastic bubble cars with hooks that attach to monorails built by Charlton Heston that pass over the Free Paradise of abandoned objects in the center of the city near where the community movie sets would also be; and where Maria Montez and Johnny Weismuller would labour to dissolve all national boundaries and release the prisoners of Uranus. [Jack Smith, "Capitalism of Lotusland"]
Save us Ginger Rogers, save us Gary Cooper, from the Kirbytech lust of the Brides of Frankenstein...!
Note: Look Out!! Monsters received a Xeric grant in Fall 2007 and is soon to be solicited via Previews. Look for it in comics shops this September.
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