Mindless Ones

Elephantmen #33, by Richard Star King and Shaky Kane. Gregory Wright on colours. Image 2011.

Despite his brutal murder in the final issue of The Bulletproof Coffin, Richard Star King, undead and loving it, is still making comics from beyond the veil.

King always had a spectral role as one of comics’ holy ghosts: a font of invisible, omnipresent glue. Shifting scenes, lifting palettes and folding in the letters. But a noisy spirit too, when it suited, speaking with Metatronic authorial bass in the pages of Elephantmen and elsewhere.

King was a slave to the bloggist neo-archaeologer David Hine and the legendarily cruel Shaky Kane Two-Thousand. With Elephantmen #33 Kane beat a pulped gift of a script from King. Kane gouged lines of thickly naked clarity from the skin of the page, crafting a plastic burlesque of the clinical guignol of the operating theatre.

The surgical friezes glow in the eye, touching the symbolic and psychic planes fusing the reality of the body under surgery.

Remaking antiseptic monochrome modernist gothic:

http://youtu.be/nRS0pzHfBjI

as candy-lacquered ivory cyborg surgery:

Scale up Kane’s phase shift and the conceptual distance of the body cut into a state of over-exposure reflects the abstract gap in how the body thinks of itself. Shift again and we are seeing the abjected condition of the flesh as cosmetic commodity, the hidden chrysalitic wetness between brief latex-protected projections into the glare of social scrutiny.

The trauma, violence and self-murder of the reinvention cycle as the secret privations towards the endlessly obliterating prison of aspirant immortality.

Kane and King are dead yet still stalk heavy earths stronger and more vivid of truth than the red meat prison planet where you sit and that decays you.

King, Kane and Hine will show you existence by injuring it in Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #1 dropping Wednesday.