SYMBOL READER

Every earthly object, even the most squalid, must be read as the hieroglyph of something else.

[wardzwart]

Winged creatures of all sorts—owls, bees, dragons—take flight in the comics of Ben Duncan, Lala Albert, and Ward Zwart.

a nice little write-up about my ‘Moon’ comic…

[symbolreader]

Some languages depend more heavily than others on sequence to convey meaning. Word order in Latin is fungible because each word in a sentence is inflected to denote its role: “Agricolam amat puella” and “puella amat agricolam” are the same, since the accusative “-am” ending indicates the recipient of the verb’s action. In English, word order is more important: “the girl loves the farmer” and “the farmer loves the girl” describe different matters entirely. The syntax of comics is expressed through order, proximity, and repetition: we learn what an image is doing on the page almost entirely by examining its position among its neighbors. Not all cartoonists draw attention to this–in fact many labor to make the psychological interval between each panel as unobtrusive as possible. In Aidan Koch’s “Configurations” the interval is central, impossible for the reader to ignore, and in a sense that’s what this comic is actually about: the struggle to glean narrative significance amid disparate objects and incidents, the search for a meaningful story arc within seemingly random events. (via The Art of Divination | The Comics Journal)

[symbolreader]

The phallus, as distinct from a mere erect penis, is an unattainable object embodying desire itself, the fantasy of perfect satisfaction. In its state of perpetual alacrity, it also presents a kind of demand: the imperative to pursue and enjoy. But this quest can have no end–the phallus is a mirage camouflaging a fundamental lack, for in reality there exists no ultimate enjoyment to quell once and for all the longing for further enjoyment. The only option that remains is to derive some fleeting pleasure from the illusion itself. An unwinnable quest for satisfaction is at the heart of Michael DeForge’s “Actual Trouble,” so it’s fitting that a priapic lover takes center stage, superhuman resilience elevating his erection to the mythic “phallus” status. The comic is dense with more subtle phallic imagery too–a pencil, a piece of chalk, a throbbing hand, a lit joint, and even a shuddering auroral curtain seem to jut into the panel at eager 45-degree angles. Like the physiological state they evoke, the potency of these objects is more promise than fulfillment. When a character does manage to wield a phallic symbol, it behaves unpredictably, paired with text betraying the farce the image had concealed: the exams conquered by the pencil are “antiquated and arbitrary;” as Jason, the narrator, holds up the authoritative chalk he realizes with disappointment that his stable teaching job has replaced a stable love life. Read the full analysis here.

[joedecie]

True story. Apparently you can make a nice Jamaican Punch if you mix one with a Guinness. Sounds so wrong, it could be right.

[symbolreader]

Preferences don't occur in a vacuum. The rules by which we curate our lives are a complex web of past experiences and associations--behind every aesthetic impulse is an emotional one. In his lecture "The Superego and the Act," Žižek suggests indistinguishability "between the object of desire and that which makes me desire the object.... [T]he whole point of psychoanalysis is that desire is mediated. It is never: 'I like strawberry cake.' Ok, maybe you do but that’s another story. The point is that I like the cake because for example I know that another person that I love likes it and I want to impress them. Desire is in a sense always intersubjective, it is never simply me and the object." In his one-page comic "These Cans," Joe Decie depicts the perverse bargain of melancholic desire, whereby an object's utility is not in its literal use but in its fetishistic function: it signifies desirable feelings and experiences to the user independent of its actual purpose, which is irrelevant.

Read the rest of this analysis at TCJ.com.

[sophiefranzcomics]

I did this comic for free comic book day, but now that free comic book day is over I’m putting it up here.  Still for free.

[symbolreader]

Consider the bird-hunting scouts in this comic by Sophie Franz, facing their quarry like an army arrayed for battle. Their leader sternly warns them to approach the quest with “the proper respect.”  A child with a heart murmur is ejected for his weakness. Another little boy, Marcus, isn’t quite up to snuff—not only is his blithe smile mismatched with his scowling cohort, but where they’re decked out with nets, ropes, and elaborate headgear, Marcus appears to be naked but for the bucket on his head. The other kids give eye him suspiciously, the leader suggests Marcus might not “have what it takes,” but Marcus’s mild expression remains fixed.

The game, as the troop leader presents it, is macho, militaristic, and adversarial: the scouts are expected to prove their worth, using any weapon to hand to ensnare the “desirable specimens” and return them, unscathed, to captivity. But when the others rush into the fray brandishing their nets, gentle Marcus seduces: his whistle attracts an ominous flock to neutralize his shocked competition. His bucket/hat is full of birdseed, enticing a songbird to land on his head. This could be read as a lightweight parable for one in search of inspiration—it can’t be clobbered into submission, it must be wooed and allowed to approach at its own pace—but the talons and sharp beaks of Marcus’s intercessors, as well as his own flatly beatific affect, hint at something more sinister. Aligning oneself with madness, a renunciation of societal laws in favor of the Real, is here a shortcut to victory, but the kill-or-be-killed game is inescapable, the only question is who will be the prey.

Read the full analysis at TCJ.com.

[newyorker]

Who needs friends when you’ve got Terry Gross? An illustration by Eleanor Davis: http://nyr.kr/1nYvPYw

[symbolreader]

The psyche requires an "other," the hypothetical imaginary friend to whom we address dialogues we cannot entrust to actual people in our lives. Often this other takes the form of an idealized version of a person close to us (we imagine a loved one holding our hand during a difficult medical procedure), or even someone we dislike (we visualize delivering the tirade an unscrupulous friend deserves, and enjoy imagining that person's reaction) and we withhold the pursuit of the experience in reality because we know it cannot produce more satisfaction than its counterpart in fantasy. In fact the task of reconciling our actual relationships against the projected desires with which we mentally conflate them can be aversive, leading us to dodge true intimacy lest actual events somehow contradict a more comfortable constructed narrative. Essentially this is the question posed in the very first panel of Eleanor Davis's comic for the New Yorker: Who needs friends when you have Terry Gross?

Read the rest of this analysis at TCJ.com.

[thebristolboard]

[symbolreader]

"Man-Cat" by Eric Haven.

Human-animal hybrids are personifications of man's bestial nature, and they're figures of horror because loss of self-control, a return to the pre-civilized state, is one of our most basic fears. It is also irresistibly seductive. We sense that if they were allowed free rein, our animal instincts would be compelling enough to overwhelm our humanity irrevocably, and the knowledge that we ourselves transpire from nature leads us to suspect that the destructive urge is the voice of our true selves.

An animal man, a minotaur, a werewolf, combines a man's mental and emotional capacities with the uncontrolled, amoral strength of a beast (the archetypal "beast," since in reality the animal kingdom is flush with intellectual and moral exemplars), and the resulting creature is a rapacious self-loathing abomination. The very liminality which defines him also damns him: man and beast cannot comfortably co-exist as one. Therefore every beast-man tale comprises an both acknowledgement of the inescapable id, and a warning not to let it loose at all.

Read the rest of this analysis at TCJ.com.

[andsoluke]

"Dance Yourself To Death" - For the Irene 3 anthology. Buy the entire mind explosive anthology today! 

[joemoc]

Another comic by Luke Howard!

[symbolreader]

Artists are vulnerable to the fantasy of self-destruction as the ultimate badge of authenticity. The work is so pure, so intense, so transcendent (so the familiar narrative goes) that its conduit burns out like an overloaded fuse. The young innovators whose creations triggered paradigm shifts in their media as they themselves succumbed to self-inflicted martyrdoms seem to us as tools which the hand of god used briefly, too forcefully, and then broke. With maturity we learn to recognize this as a fiction, written to rationalize senseless death and pain. Once you’ve been or loved an addict, for example, the idea of addiction loses its romance. But even when we should know better, in certain personalities the desire to give one’s life to something greater, something noble and true, in this case an artistic vision, persists. For them, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote this prayer: “I am a bow in your hands…. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break.”

Read the rest of this analysis at TCJ.com.

[symbolreader]

Blood sacrifices are made to appease the inescapable id in comics by Grant Snider, Sophie Franz, Eric Haven, and Luke Howard. This is my second Symbol Reader column for TCJ.com.

[nevver]

Collecting My Thoughts

[symbolreader]

Birds and other flying creatures are associated with Mercury, the wing-footed messenger god, and thus with intellectual thought, ideas, and communication. Birds sing to one another and can be trained to speak and carry messages for humans who tame them, and like thoughts, they freely explore places beyond human (physical) reach. Inspired ideas can seem to be soaring overhead; we glimpse them and hope they will choose us as their perch. Untethered birds are impracticable ideas, ideas not yet snared by the ponderous necessity of action. Sometimes airborne imagery denotes wishful thinking: an unrealistic fantasy is a “flight of fancy,” a daydreamer’s refuge is “cloud cuckoo land.” When a flock behaves unpredictably or attacks, insanity is implied—the subject’s own thoughts are trying to kill them.

Grant Snider, in “Collecting My Thoughts,” presents himself as at the mercy of his untamed mind. In the form of winged animals, the thoughts swarm, buzz, evade, impose, stupefy and loom. He gets the better of them only twice—his “bottled up thoughts” (trapped safe in a jar) and “thoughtlessness” (the thought/bird apparently slain with a slingshot) allow him to feel in control, but now he’s attacking them, rather than engaging. And the rest of the time he’s content to let the thoughts run roughshod over him, while he plays the role of their hapless observer, apparently unmotivated to chase them down, preferring to be resigned to his neurosis.

Read the rest of this analysis at TCJ.com.

[symbolreader]

Symbol Reader is now a monthly column on The Comics Journal! In this inaugural entry, “Shadow Puppets,” I look at secret desires projected onto external proxies in comics by Joe Decie, Eleanor Davis, and Michael DeForge.

[atpratt]

"Friday the 13th" 2013

My entry in

Plus no. 13

[symbolreader]

We belong, in our essence, to the natural world, but the meta-world we've constructed for our species to inhabit is frequently at odds with nature. The imposition of taxonomy and structure on the chaos we were born to should provide some safety, but our hubris also introduces its own horrors. The cycle of sun and seasons, once bounded only by distant horizons of birth and death, we read now as a gridded minefield of birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and observances. We didn't invent the calendar to warn us about Friday the 13th--the calendar invented Friday the 13th to torture us. Superstition brings bad luck.

Nature mocks the harried protagonist of "Friday the 13th" from the start. He's awoken by an owl (a symbol of unconscious and innate knowledge) hooting contemptuously as he gapes at the abominable calendar. Corralled by the inauspicious date into a compounding orgy of unluckiness, he lurches haplessly from one omen to the next, but the snowballing bad luck mostly manifests in its own meta-language of superstition: the mirror cracks, the umbrella inverts, he spots a black cat, he walks under a ladder, events which human wisdom elevates from merely innocuous or irritating to spiritually disastrous. Nature attacks, too, in the form of forceful wind and rain.

The mutilation of a cowering pet store rabbit allows him to regain the illusion of control: a symbolic blow is struck against nature itself, and nature is crippled by man's power. And the bad luck accumulated throughout the comic will be neutralized by this potent lucky charm--thus allowing the man to regain mastery of the self-referential superstitions of his calendar.

[1000drawings]

by Tom Gauld

[symbolreader]

A house stands for an individual mind or body. Depending on context, an attic can indicate one's loftier thoughts or one's literal head, the windows might be eyes or empathy, but the state of the house, its integrity, its level of upkeep, and the comfort of the subject inside it are clues to its symbolic function. A breach of the house is a transgression of the boundaries which kept the subject secure--when the house remains intact, its inhabitant remains safely bounded in inviolate self-determined personhood. Of course, like the security of the literal house, such psychological security is both a necessity, and largely a manmade defensive illusion.

Tom Gauld offers a week's worth of self-defense in "The Reason I Stayed in the House All Day," with excuses ranging from the mundane ("waiting for the fridge to be delivered") to the fantastic ("galactic conflict"). This house is a fortress, and its implied inhabitant is obdurate in maintaining isolation at all costs--there's no thought of escape from the path of natural disaster, nor of willing contact with the unknown, because leaving the house for any reason would threaten the established boundaries of the self. The only acceptable action, therefore, is to turn further inwards. Self-limitation creates a space for refuge.

[madeleineishere-deactivated2017]

This is based on a superstition my mom had, she always made sure I carried a coin.

I did this comic in 1hr. to challenge myself to make something. Enjoy :)

[symbolreader]

Forests are the symbolic locus of chaos and transition. Within their primordial depths churn decay, growth, struggle, and violence, independent of human oversight, and forest-dwellers, when disturbed by human interlopers, typically act as agents of change, providing the protagonist with the necessary tools to achieve the next stage in their journey. The mythical wood therefore is associated with the most dangerous and exciting moment of a transition: that when the former status has already been stripped away, but the new status has not yet been conferred. A human character entering the wilderness does not know what she will be when (if) she comes out again.

As it did to her antecedents, Red Riding Hood and Vasilissa the Beautiful, the forest offers the young protagonist of Madeleine Flores’s “Schwarzwald” a point of access to adulthood. But contrasting Red Riding Hood’s narrative of sexual awakening (that red hood, that seductive devourer), or Vasilissa’s hard-earned self-sufficiency, impending maturity holds little allure for the prepubescent heroine of "Schwarzwald"—she doesn’t enter the forest on a quest, she's just playing there. And though the man who lives in the woods, caprine and cadaverous, an embodiment of the corrupt adult consciousness lurking at the very edges of the infant mind, does grimly try to take her, her wise mother has imposed a safeguard to preserve her innocence: a coin, itself a tool of adult corruption, sewn into the protective overcoat, which buys a little more time to play.

[bikesbabesandbooze-deactivated2]

[symbolreader]

The feminine body menaces by devouring. In childhood we develop a psychologically healthy dread of reabsorption into our fathomless mothers (though we retain a paradoxical longing for their profound acceptance), and this dread mimics the dread of death which promises to subsume our individual selves into its undifferentiated void. When the three-breasted witch of Anna Bongiovanni's comic begs a younger woman to stay with her and be her baby, pressing her forcefully to her heart, she presents her with a twofold horror--even if the young woman resists the invitation to regress to infancy, she has received a grim vision of the dangerous thing she most desires: a ravenous maternal body, unable to overcome the loss of the child that defined it.

The witch's indifference to the young woman's anxiety and discomfort aligns her with the forces of nature, which places inexorable demands on the mechanics of the body without concern for social or emotional precepts, and presumably as her center breast bestows the power of procreation, so do the others initiate into the two bookending stages of physical womanhood. To attain the maternal state, the young woman must perform her own sacrament of acceptance: by accepting the witch's milk she accepts the demanding body, and then she disengages, not without trepidation, to put the dubious gift to her own use.

[symbolreader]

Julia Gfrörer is an elderly beggar woman who practices the divinitory arts in exchange for crusts of bread and kisses from comely youths. 

[symbolreader]

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum