Loser Comix – So what?
Or, the garage band approach to comics.

Well, really, what can be said about this mess? It's just another of a billion possible wouldabeen, couldabeen, wannabe comics projects littering the net, isn't it? And wouldn't that be an excellent definition for the net as a whole in terms of its content: LITTER?

But that's the beauty of a thing once it has lost all claim to commercial value – it can just be whatever it is. And this story, an online graphic novel published in chapter form, can just be what it started off as being, namely a movie script without a chance in hell of becoming a movie. That's all graphic novels are, folks – movies without the budget. Pure entertainment. And if deep subjects are touched upon in the unfolding of the story, all the better, but the point of the exercise is not a lesson in philosophy, but rather in being a good waste of time. By a loser for losers, a whole generation or two of losers.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, storytellers plied their trade and got what share of the audience as might come their way which meant, for most, the audience size was no larger than the tribe around the fire or the family in the parlor or the cronies on the front porch or seated on an old couch outside the local Phillips '66 station. Mass communications methods enlarged the audience for a few lucky (and sometimes talented) artists – the printing press, the radio, the television, the cinema – while simultaneously leaving the majority of storytellers bereft of a place in the community. Who wanted to hear cousin Edgar tell old hunting stories when we could hear ol' Jerry Clower regale us with the Mississippi Coon or The Red Hot Steel Balls of Fire? Same thing went with music, didn't it? Who wanted to hear sister Emma play "Beautiful Dreamer" on the piano in the living room anymore when we could hear Debbie Reynolds sing "Tammy" on the stereo? Debbie Reynolds was sanctified by the record industry… sister Em, well, we saw her every day. She was just a person like everyone else. Debbie Reynolds was royalty.

Along came the net.

MP3s fixed it so that Debbie Reynolds and Metallica were not only as common as dirt, but free, too. The works of great poets and Billy Bob the Rap Master Rhyming Freak of Peoria appeared side by side, as if equivalent in value. The net, being the ultimate in mass communications, reduced everything to the same level – any value, in terms of culture, had to be recognized or supplied by the audience, not solely by the corporations that had, under the reign of pure capitalism, usurped the place of the community and the family and the individual in the evaluation of worth. It was as if all cultural output suddenly could be fed through a CB radio rather than the filtering screen of a commercial station.

Which state of affairs, of course, had mixed results: In reality, macaroni sculpture isn't equivalent to anything made by a Michaelangelo or a Giacommetti, though the net makes no effort to tell you that. Noise by drunk 20 year olds armed with rubber bands and a kazoo isn't on the same plane as a fart by Bach; but then again, prior to the net, it wasn't apparent that Metallica's noise wasn't as honest as the kids' or as talented as Bach's either. The net opened up a flat plane of pure freedom, freedom to reevaluate drunk 20 year olds against Bachs and Metallicas, macaroni sculpture against the Pieta; but to paraphrase Sartre, the net also doomed us to a certain uncomfortable freedom. It left all of us with the responsibility to judge what a good piece of music or art or writing is without relying solely on the corporations and the preexisting traditions to do it for us. A tall order. Philosophers such as Nietzche predicted that such a day would arrive… and they also predicted that damn few of us would be up to the challenge; we'd fall back on the old ways, they said, or knuckle under to the new persuasive voices that might arise. For no better reason than we're too lazy to exercise our birthright and responsibility to that terrible thing called freedom. Maybe that's one reason we presently see the corporations and traditions scrambling to gain some sort of economic and "moral" control over the content of the web. We've left a vacuum.

What the hell does that have to do with this comic?

Everything and nothing. The thing's here for you to read and hopefully enjoy, and that's really enough. But it's also here for another reason, a reason that is more for the edification of its author than as motivation for its readers. I mean, the story is an example of a new cultural form (mind you, I'm not claiming it's a very good example, only an instance of a new thing). How so? Recall what I said earlier – once upon a time, most storytellers had their audiences and the audiences were local. They occupied the tribal fire, the parlor, the porch, the gas station. And then these audiences were all but taken away by mass media forms – printing, radio, television, cinema. But here is the return of the individual storyteller in the form of the graphic novel, but not a graphic novel propagated by commercially controlled mass media. It's a graphic novel published for a mass audience, but "as if" the audience was in the parlor or around the fire right in front of the author (note: web pages perform the same task for others). It is also a graphic novel told "as if" it were just a story passed around a campfire – loose, quick, dirty sketches (for the most part) to get the ideas across. Like a garage band wailing away without a whole lot of care about missed notes or meandering passages – thinking out loud within a medium.

The commercial tastes that once would have either made this project impossible or would have inserted themselves squarely between audience and storyteller and warped the manner in which the story was told are gone and the terrible freedom to simply tell the story is back on the shoulders of the author. Once again, the story is a matter of between the muses, the poet, and his audience. Any financial benefits that might flow later are incidental and, to be truthful, unimaginable. The storyteller doesn't tell a story for the sake of money – he tells it for the sake of the story, to tell the story well, to entertain his audience. An appreciative audience will (or should) act to keep the storyteller alive, but any storyteller in the medium of "internet" is a fool if he believes his audience will reach out voluntarily to reward him for services rendered. At least in terms of money. So, either the author will have to charge for access to his site or leave it up to his readership how he is to be rewarded.

In the case of this story, I leave it up to the reader what, if any, should be my "extraneous" reward. Even praise is reward and, in my tradition, the storyteller often worked for little more than dinner or a draw off the bottle, a good word and a good reputation. Gaining a good reputation for this project, especially by word of mouth at cons and on the web would, for me, be worth a fortune, like all those bands who used to play Seattle in the hey day just because they got a kick out of the audience reaction.

So read this thing and enjoy it, enjoy the art, enjoy the idea. Make your own movies. Subvert the old system. Being damned to freedom is more fun than Sartre advertised.

Richard Van Ingram
Writer, Artist, Philosopher, Agent Provocateur
zero_fool_zero@yahoo.com

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