Welcome back to the Labyrinth of Constraints! Today I'm going to share a one-page comics experiment based on a men’s clothing add in the newspaper (ca. 1995). But first, a bit of news:
My collection of constrained comics, Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure, is at the printer and we are expecting to have copies soon!! Bookstore date is late October but you can pre-order now from Uncivilized Books.
I’m ramping up for promo and media so if you are a podcaster or journalist feel free to hit me up for an interview or guest spot!
I’m excited to announce that Six Treasures of the Spiral will have an exclusive pre-release debut at SPX, the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD on September 14-15. I’ll be tabling with Uncivilized Books (tables W 47-48) and I’ll be offering a tritina comic workshop on Saturday from 5 to 6:30PM.
99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style continues to find readers—and publishers!—around the world. The latest translation is in Complex Mandarin Chinese and it will be coming out in Taiwan from Emily Publishing in October. Check out this charming cover design with the expanded subtitle, “Unstoppable Exercises in Style!”
A Comics Contrafact?
Here’s a one-page comic that appears in my new Six Treasures collection:
I drew this back in 1995. It was based on a full-page department store ad I found in the Austin-American Statesman (which I recently dug out of an old flat file):
I came up with the idea to turn this ad into a comic by minimally changing the copy to introduce a narrative/emotional subtext. I’ve been trying to think what to call this procedure: it’s clearly a type of détournement like the famous comics hijacked by the Situationist International…
…or the interventions on the comics page as a canvas for manipulation, as in the work of Rivane Neuenschwander:
…or my Oubapo colleague and friend Jochen Gerner’s blacking out of Hergé’s Tintin in America.
But what I’m doing here is a more minimal reworking, keeping the original structure of the page intact while changing the text from advertising to narration.
It occurred to me that this strategy is a bit like the musical composition technique called a contrafact, where you play a new melody over an existing (usually well-known) song. A famous example from the jazz canon is Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” which puts a new, faster melody over the chord changes from the standard “How High the Moon” (this link is to a Sonny Rollins version for comparison to Bird’s—but you might know the tune better from the famous Les Paul and Mary Ford version).
On the other hand, you could also say I’m doing a spoof or parody in the tradition of “Weird Al” Yankovic! That’s certainly the precedent in comics, where ads have been riffed on since the days of MAD Magazine through R. Crumb and up to the elaborate layouts of Chris Ware:
Ware’s work in this domain was definitely a primary influence on “Don’t Wait for a Sale!”
I have been unable to locate—online or in my house (this is why you should NEVER get rid of anything EVER!!)—another important influence on this comic, a page by Jim Woodring from his JIM magazine-sized series that was a beguiling, Surrealist ad for a product whose actual function remains inscrutable. If anyone remembers what I’m talking about, please let me know!
I did a variation on this conceit in 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style: for one of the exercises I imagined each panel as an advertisement for an object or service associated with something in that panel. I then designed and drew the ads and laid them out as if they were from the back of some magazine or newspaper:
But Wait, There’s More!!
I was planning to make this a quick update but I just have too much fun stuff to share, so here’s one more section about “Don’t Wait for a Sale!”
I've resisted going back into early comics to fiddle with the art but as I was putting Six Treasures together, I realized I could quickly re-scan the ink washes I did for "Don't Wait for a Sale!," which was first published in my old minicomic, Terrifying Steamboat Stories #4 in 1995—it's one of the oldest stories in the new collection.
The version my publisher Tom and I had been working with was a scan of a photostat—a completely obsolete but once state-of-the-art method for prepping art for reproduction. We started to get worried that there might be some moiré patterning—that distracting interference you sometimes see on halftone dot screens—so I decided to dig into my flat files to see if I could make a new scan.
I managed to find the original paste-up (also an obsolete technique) with the stat and the copy pasted on with rubber cement (ditto):
…as well as the original newspaper tearsheet (shown above) and the original ink wash on bristol board (side note: I could have just appropriated the art from the newspaper but at that time I was trying to learn how to do ink washes so I took it on as a kind of homework assignment):
I rescanned the wash and was able to bring out a few more details, like the stripes on the guy's shirt, and drop it in over the old scan.
The image below shows what happens when you convert the grayscale file (above) to Bitmap in Adobe Photoshop using the Halftone Screen Method. It allows you to generate the coarse halftone dots of old newspapers without worrying about moiré patterns (which you may in fact see on this screen since I had to convert the bitmap back into grayscale to be able to display online):
Give It a Try!
Next time you come across an ad that catches your eye for some reason, clip it or download it. Maybe it has a series of images that suggest a story; or maybe there’s something unintentionally fun or latently sinister about the juxtaposition of images.
Change the ad into a new work of art however you see fit:
swap out the copy with a new text you have written (contorting the original copy as I did or jettisoning it entirely, like the Situationists)
Scan or collage the original ad or re-draw the art and change it as you please.
Come up with an original ad that seems almost plausible at a quick glance.
As always, I’d love to see your work if you make one of these (or something similar). And remember that with a paid subscription you can share it with me in my Chat or in one of my periodic group Zooms.
Three Things I've Been Enjoying
1
“How High the Moon” as performed by Ella Fitzgerald on the album Lullabies of Birdland
The reason this song quickly came to my mind for this newsletter is because I’ve been fixated for months on this particular 1948 recording of it by Ella Fitzgerald. Her scatting is incredibly musical even as it is dizzying in speed and range. And I recently learned that one of my favorite melodic lines from the solo (the second verse) is in fact a nod to Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” the contrafact I mentioned above.
2
La Planète des singes (1963) by Pierre Boulle
Over the last year my son and I watched the quite good Planet of the Apes trilogy from recent years (Rise/Dawn/War) and that led to us watching the original 1968 film. I hadn’t watched it since my multiple The 4:30 Movie (how has that theme not been sampled 1000 times?) viewings as a pre-teen—it holds up quite well! (I refuse to let my son watch the listless Tim Burton reboot.)
I had never realized that the movie is based on a French novel, one written by the author Pierre Boulle, who also wrote Bridge over the River Kwai! I ordered it online and found it to be compulsively readable pulp, with more of a satiric edge than the movie (which was mostly written by Rod Serling). The ending is quite different in ways that I won’t spoil, but I have to say I side with Serling and crew!
3
Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer fait tousser) (2022), written and directed by Quentin Dupieux
The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers-like “Tobacco Force” (with powers like “nicotine” and “methanol”) are sent by their revolting muppet-rat boss on a retreat to work on their team cohesion before the next threat to the planet happens.
There are shades of Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman: The monsters are made of rubber, the technology is early 80s retro, and there are absurdist details like a full-service supermarket inside the refrigerator of their forest bunker (where they sleep on metal slabs with their helmets on).
What makes it really interesting is that the retreat becomes a kind of Decameron set-up, where the team members start telling each other scary stories to pass the time, but the stories, presented as short films, are instead incredibly surreal, hilarious, and disturbing—including one that is narrated by a barracuda as it cooks on a griddle.
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Meanwhile, I hope you’ll share this post if you enjoyed it and feel free to comment about newpsaper ad comics or any of my “Three Things.” See you soon.