I picked up a comic by an up-and-coming artist/writer named Tyrell Cannon. It was his exhibition piece for the undergrad show for the School of the Art Institute. It consisted of three parts. I wouldn't really call them stories, more like graphical essays.
The first,
Cyborgs Are Not Our Friends, was my least favorite. I seemed a little too purposely esoteric and I felt like he was trying to say something that I had to decode. And furthermore, that whatever "it" was was personal enough that only he could figure it out. I think it was vaguely about self-hatred and misogyny, but I didn't get the cyborg thing. I think it was either Susan Sontag or Donna Harraway (both feminists who pontificate a lot about future and robots and stuff, thus the confusion [plus I can't find either of the books I have by them and I'm not about to google it just for this entry]) who first talked about women being cyborgs in the purest sense of the word (at least by her definition) and I've never quite been able to remove that association from my head, which may have something to do with the fact that I didn't quite understand Cannon's first part.
The second piece, entitled
Simon: Combat, was very cool. I think that Cannon's strength lies in his artwork, and he shines in this part because it is entirely a graphic piece - no narrative. It's basically an elaborate fight scene that looks like it could have been off the story-board of the film
Kill Bill. You can even purchase merchandise for the character Simon
here.
The last part was pretty cool, too, and seemed to follow his "mission statement" about the comic book artform, which he included on the inside back cover of the book:
My artwork explores the medium of comics formally and contextually as an art form. The comic is a rich ground for artistic exploration in that it is capable of communicating in complex ways that other mediums cannot. The comic book is a mixture of many other mediums and possesses the unique ability to simultaneously exist as drawings, stories, poetry, paintings, books, sculptures, etc. A comic itself is comprised of line, time, space, composition, language, expression, texture, and much more. Comics do not have to be restricted to linear narratives involving characters, but can exist as the artistic expression of thoughts and ideas. The focus of my comic book work is to explore personal and social aspects of the human experience. I hope to uniquely address life in a way that speaks to the individual on a more personal level while also challenging what the comic book medium is capable of achieving artistically.
Given the SAIC's reputation for being a conceptual art school, I half-wondered if he threw that in to justify his work. This is the kind of snobbery to which my acquaintance was referring when he said "I've
known some great people that have gone there, but if you could find some way to harness the *attitude* from that place and turn it into energy, you could solve the nation's energy problems."
However, the piece I was talking about in the first place sort of backs up his thesis. The title is
When. It starts out looking almost like a space story, just blackness and white spots. But by the 5th or 6th panel you see the familiar iconography for sperm and egg. Cannon illustrates the progressive development of a human foetus--presumably his own--and posits questions about the nature of being using sparse, poetic language. Whether this is a truly ontological essay or more of a anti-choice statement on abortion, I wasn't sure. Again, it seemed profoundly personal, but didn't present the same sort of intellectual quagmire that the first piece did.
The last two panels beg the most questions, though. First there is an image of the infant sort of hatching from an egg that looks like it could possibly be positioned within a human female's birth canal. It's very confusing. Since there was this context of mistaken space in the beginning and also the first story talking about cyborgs, I almost took it as alien imagery. Who's to say? Well, he is, I suppose. The last panel is of the artist, peering through blackness, fully grown, with a bit of text:
"Peering through flesh fingers into darkness / I realize I am more than my cell. / I am more than the sum of my parts. / I am."
The style of artwork in the third piece was more free-form than the first two pieces. It was moody and made use of negative space more freely. All in all, I thought the three pieces complemented one another pretty well, but again, that the first part seemed a little weaker in terms of what it was trying to say, if anything.
bhofmeister13