Greetings Mr Graham. You were due to be interviewed by The Beast Must Die, but sadly he is too busy travelling the globe as an international podcasting megastar with his good friend/mortal enemy Gary Lactus. Therefore you will instead be strapped into the Quizzlertron, and be interviewed by Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735. Expect no fleshy soft peddling and ego-stroking – Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 is hard-hitting interviewer. Expect Frost/Nixon style hardball, human! Be warned –any deviation from the truth will result in severe electric shocks to the balls, nipples and brain. You have been warned fleshy one. Now on with interview good times, yes sir!

Section 1: Secret Origin

1) First question, simple. Or is it hard? YOU DECIDE FLESHY ONE. Why comics?

BG – It was a decision that I made before I remember making it. My mom says that when I was Seven I announced that I was going to do comics for a living. Past that incredibly well thought out life choice comics has been amazingly rewarding, there’s so much that can be done when you consider what’s possible in mixing words and images and how much of it is still so untapped. My big fear is not doing nearly as much as could be done with it. I feel like I’m on a comic book continent and I’ve just explored the coast but behind me is miles and miles of untapped mysteries. Tell me Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735, have you ever really loved a woman? You’ve got to know her deep inside hear her every thought see every dream and give her wings if she wants to fly…

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Windowpane #1, by Joe Kessler 

 

There’s a point early on in this comic where you realise that you’re not so much watching characters describe a landscape as watching the landscape try work out how to describe itself. This might seem counter-intuitive but from the end of the first story onward the pattern repeats itself – Joe Kessler’s garish, pastel-hued compositions either  break down into their constituent lines after exhaustive exploration or sit there seemingly unaffected by the words and actions that have passed through them.

The best example of the latter category involves a wet-dream about a pig in a dress, whose fall through the night sky is contrasted against an unflinching cityscape with a moment-by-moment precision that does far better justice to the pithy punchline than this description:

In the former category, the Invisible Cities-derived third strip is as close to definitive as Windowpane gets.  The way it links its characters shared status as splashes of ink and colour on the page with their philosophising about the interconnected nature of reality — “…a cluster of atoms resembles a cluster of galaxies.”/”Well they’re both clusters” — might seem trite in isolation, but the surrounding stories make these philosophical observations feel more like a little bit of texture on a varied landscape.

All of this might  sound a bit chilly and distant, but Kessler’s human figures are depicted with a deceptive sort of ease, as a series of curving lines whose relationships to each other is nevertheless very carefully observed and delineated:

 

Still, in keeping with Kessler’s paradoxical thematic schemata it’s the backgrounds that are the focus here, existing as they do on the precise point where detail blurs into abstraction.  The interaction between text and territory here has a sly kinshsip with Dylan Horrocks writing on maps and comics, and perhaps also with Kevin Huizenga’s conception of the comics page as a place for exploration and discovery, but Kessler’s backgrounds have a forcefulness to them that resists his characters attempts at attaching meaning as much as it encourages them.

This is tricky relationship is most clearly explored in the final two strips.  In  the penultimate entry, words shrink on the page as Kessler depicts his precarious human figures parachuting in to kindle-worthy hillscape:

Thought and language here are reduced to a form of quaint annotation, one that is far less effective at providing a guide to this hazardous landscape than the blocky symbols that line these panels.

The final story focuses on a burned lover who – uh, *SPOILERS* – tries to find solace in the freak resemblance between a man and a decapitated bull.  It plays out like a sneaky assurance that the process of muck sitting up, looking itself and trying to figure itself out isn’t totally meaningless. It’s also the sort of assurance that’s both underlined and undermined by the fact that,  unlike any given sunset, you know this resemblance was put there to be noticed.

Click here to read about more gud comics on the site that just can’t seem to quit you, no matter how many resolutions it makes!

SILENCE! podcast #2

February 15th, 2012

In the second scintillating episode, The Beast broadcasts live from Alan Moore’s beard, while Lactus continues his lonely (yet chatty) vigil orbiting above the South Coast of England in his galactic treehouse… Topics include the many Jason Aaron’s (or at least the ones who write Wolverine and The X-Men and PunisherMaxExtremeZero), Prophet (in which Lactus does a very horrid alien vagina impression) Casey & Fox’s lurid Haunt, superhero comics ‘ending’, Adventure Time, and the possibility of forcing children to review comics. And it all gets very romantic at the end, in this pulse-pounding Valentines episode…

[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/silence002.mp3]

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