“You, Again?”
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689663
ISSN1539-7858
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoPrevious articleNext article Free“You, Again?”Gary SullivanGary Sullivan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGary Sullivan’s “You, Again?” examines mechanisms by which comedy is made manifest in comic art and animation. The captions involve a series of tropes and clichés that are part of the visual language of humor comics and cartoons—the use of wavy lines to symbolize smells or stars to symbolize pain, for example. Sullivan puts these texts into poetic play by inserting them into speech and thought balloons coming from the mouths and foreheads of generic and iconic characters from comics around the world—from Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (page 2, panel 4), to Mette K. Hellenes’s Mette and Vanessa (page 5, panel 1), to several iterations of Mickey Mouse (page 9).“You, Again?” draws upon Sullivan’s prior work as a poet and the creator of two ongoing poetry comics series, “The New Life” and Elsewhere. (The title page was actually redrawn from a page in the second issue of Elsewhere.) Rather than narrate stories (or tell jokes) with text and sequential images, Sullivan’s work samples and remixes existing comics and other found images to create destabilizing poems that proceed along associative lines.In a letter to the editors Sullivan writes:There’s a theory about panel-to-panel transitions, a phenomenon the cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud calls “closure,” that accounts for how narrative is constructed in comics.1 Basically, readers fill in the gaps between panels with whatever information they need to explain how we went from the action detailed in the previous panel to whatever’s going on in the next one that follows. That always struck me as close to how much of the experimental end of poetry tends to work, and I’ve always got it in the back of my mind when I’m creating comics. But rather than juxtapose a bunch of random, disparate images, I prefer to weight text and images in such a way as to exploit the gap between panels for whatever poetic value might be lurking in there. When it’s successful, a reader should only be vaguely aware that things aren’t actually adding up. I mean, they’re not —not on the expected, horizontal (or narrative) axis, anyway. But the moment you switch your focus to a vertical (or poetic) axis, that’s when the work, if I’ve done my job, begins to resonate.—The EditorsFigure 1. Panel redrawn and taken from Bülent Üstün, cover, Lomback #59 (Turkey, 2006).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 2. (From top) Panels redrawn and taken from Oky Fuki, “Saftirikler” (Turkey, 2006); Adão Iturrusgarai, Kiki: A Primeira Vez (Brazil, 1998); uncredited, The Dandy Book 1986, (Great Britain, 1986); Ernie Bushmiller, “Nancy” (United States, date unknown).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 3. (At left, from top) Panels redrawn and taken from Shunji Enomoto, Golden Lucky 1992–1993 Shunji Enomoto (Japan, 2002); Peter Bagge, “The Sufferin’ Bastard” (United States, 1986); Abdül, “Yetenekli by Tüesdey” (“The Talented Mr. Tuesday”), (Turkey, date unknown); Yoshikazu Ebisu, “Hell’s Angel” (Japan, 1985).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 4. (From top) Panels redrawn and taken from: Behiç Pek, “Yönetmen ikram abi ve Asistan Yaşar” (Director Ikram Abi and Assistant Yasser) (Turkey, 2007); Thierry Guitard, La Fureur d’Expectore (France, 1997); uncredited, The Dandy Book 1986 (Great Britain, 1986).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 5. (From top) Panels redrawn and taken from: Mette K. Hellenes, Kebbelife (Norway, 2002); “Uncle” Waldemar Hepstein, No Comprendo! (Norway, 1997); Glauco Mattoso and Marcatti, Aventuras de Glaucomix o Pedólatra (The Adventures of Glaucomix the Foot Fetishist) (Brazil, 1990).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 6. (From top) Panels redrawn and taken from Maren Karlson, “Livin’ a Cunt Lyf” (Germany, published in Spanish translation in Gang Bang Gong, Mexico, date unknown); Conrad Boates, “Dullboy” (South Africa, 1998); “Enstantaneler” (Snapshots), Kan Ertem (Turkey, 2007); Angeli, Toda Rê Bordosa (Brazil, 2012).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 7. (From top) Panels redrawn and taken from Kaan Ertem, “Tartış-Malara son Noktayı Koyan Adam” (Turkey, 2006); Chaiwat, “Pho Son Wai” (Father Taught Me) (Thailand, date unknown); I’ve completely forgotten, but most likely Japanese or Norwegian; Bendik Kaltenborn and Kristoffer Kjølberg, Friends for Fighting (Norway, 2006).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 8. (From top) Panels redrawn and taken from Aleksandar Zograf, Hypnagogic Review #3 (Serbia, 2000); Basil Wolverton, “Powerhouse Pepper” (United States, published in RAW 2, no. 1, 1989); Kiza, “Just Another Crazy Cop” (Serbia, 2000).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 9. (At left, from top) Panels redrawn and taken from Jason, Angst Vol. 1 (Norway, 2008); Winshluss, The Mickey Mutant Show (France, 1999); R. Suicide, My Life as a Foot (Canada, 2007); Aleksandar Zograf, Hypnagogic Review #5 (Serbia, 2001); Robert Armstrong, Mickey Rat #3 (United States, 1980).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 10. (At left, from top) Panels redrawn and taken from Gomé & Fedi, @!!! (France, 2002); Aider Mahfoud, “Histoires pour rire” (Algeria, 1984); Fatih Solmaz, untitled (Turkey, 2006); unknown artist, “Το Δυναµωτικο Τον Ναπολεοντα” (The Dynamic Napoleon) (Greece, 1980).View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint“You, Again?” NotesRichard Curtis:What is the secret to great com—Rowan Atkinson:[Interrupting.] Timing.2And inflection. Or, more broadly, context. But also tropes, or repetition.Shame? Definitely projection. And distance. Comedy tends to hover at arm’s length from the teller, from what’s told, from the telling itself. The funniest single-panel comic has got to be some version of two or more people involved in something horrifying and shameful, maybe tragic; someone says: “Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh.” Comedy is invested, but in the meta-analysis as well as the individual study.So, not really tragedy plus time, but potentially (a) whatever you’ve got plus (b) whatever it takes to see it. Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet isn’t funny because Bouvard and Pécuchet are tragic figures, nor because we’re witnessing their (fictional) postretirement activities more than a century after they were conjured up. They are, rather, the lens through which we see the weakness of a structured argument. Even if we don’t quite get the joke, we’re not really laughing at their failure but at failure’s repetition, its inevitability, its insistence.“I’ve read many books,” Professor Mephisto says in the first sentence of the sex comedy Candy; “many books,” he concludes, seventy-four words later. Terry Southern has been compared to Flaubert, but not, I don’t think, to Li Yu, and yet his and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy is nothing if not The Carnal Prayer Mat; both are picaresque novels detailing the exploits of sexual adventurers that poke at puritan assumptions. It’s not the sexual excess that’s funny in either; it’s the rhetorical excess itself, the accumulation, the repetition. Jokes may rarely translate, but comedy—an inventory, a pileup, a series of prodding gestures—often does. Some day we’ll look back on it and laugh, we hope.I lifted the text for “You, Again?” from the Comics Journal’s long-defunct online message board. Someone had called for examples of comics and animation clichés, and responses flooded the thread for several days following. I organized the responses into a poem and then posted it with the title “Plop Takes” to the Flarf email list. A plop take is like a spit take, but rather than spewing his or her drink, the taker lifts off from earth, away from the observed object or event, motion lines beneath their feet.Like Candy’s Professor Mephisto, I, too, have read many books; unlike the professor, a sizeable percentage of my own “books” are treasured comics, mostly in languages other than English, found in cities around the world by myself or generous enablers aware of my lust for artifacts of international culture. To boast that I have read them is a stretch, of course. I’ve pored over them, dumbly. The panels in “You, Again?” were selected and redrawn, with minimal alteration, from some of my favorites.“You, Again?” is obviously a meditation on comedy as made manifest in the comics, but it’s not an attempt to say anything about any specific culture, nor about the “universality” of anything, really. While I do believe that comedy translates (as opposed to jokes, which require specific syntax, on top of—or, literally, beneath—everything else, and therefore don’t), I don’t believe we’re all alike. Thus the specificity of individual panels by actual (living and dead) artists, depicting comedic themes or tropes shared across cultures: exaggeration, grotesquerie, shame, projection, mirroring, repetition, accumulation. Notes The founder and leader of the controversial and influential flarf movement (2000–2010), Gary Sullivan is the author of half a dozen collections of comics, essays, plays, and poetry, including PPL in a Depot and Everyone Has a Mouth. His serialized poetry comic strip “The New Life” has run in Rain Taxi Review of Books since 1997. He hosts “Bodega Pop Live” every Wednesday on WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio (wfmu.org/playlists/pg).1. Gary Sullivan, email to editors, 4 Mar. 2016. On “closure,” see Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, Mass., 1993), p. 63.2. Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, “Joke,” comedy sketch. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 43, Number 2Winter 2017Comedy, an Issue, edited by Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689663 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Gail Whiteman, Mike Zundel, Robin Holt Provoked by Charlie Hebdo : Visual Satire and Management Studies, Academy of Management Review 43, no.33 (Jul 2018): 530–540.https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2017.0223
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