Welcome to the World of Images Degrading Forever
The first thing to quite clearly establish is this is not reality. There may well be a whole load of drawings here which look rather similar to something else and a lot of names which may sound familiar- but I can assure you this is just pure happenstance any resemblance to anything living or dead is unintentional or done as parody
If you have happened to have not read whatever it is that may look similar to this, I am not going to recommend that as a publication you can buy so you can understand what follows as what follows is not for you
If you want me to recommend anything to read It will be League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Secret Service or any comics / graphic novels that are creator owned by either Alan Moore or Dave Gibbons
None of the finished drawings that appear here will be original - they will be redrawn by hand by myself, degraded if you will
What will follow is taking the degradation up several notches as well as including completely degraded text and dialog
A total degradation if you will
Let me briefly cover the layers of degradation
Firstly the art in question can said to be symmetrical and / or a mirror of itself, an image reflecting itself - I put it to you that the narrative of the art is something other than this - and what the narrative actually is shown in the context of the piece itself:-
Witness the above - the sauce is put onto the right hand side of a folded piece of paper is folded in half to reproduce itself, a mirrored blob
Imagine the sauce is ink and the half page has a freshly printed comic book page on it and this is pushed onto a blank page, reproducing, but never exactly a degraded copy of the original
As well as this - the sequence above clearly provides a clue at how one should approach the comic in question
The right hand side of the page is the future, the left hand is the past - At least in Western culture we always read left to right.
The story is therefore told backwards from the future to the past - the next level suggests that by fixing on the unwanted future (the end of everything) then the immediate future can be known and possibly the undesired future (the end of everything) can be avoided - this is the crux of the whole entire story one might argue
Going further one sees that in fact this is pure chaos, someone vainly trying to guess and prevent the unknown future, using what crude tools and limited understanding he has, all the while failing to see there is no form or shape or even reason to anything other than what we describe - that indeed he has looked too deeply into the abyss and it has claimed him
So as we progress we will take the images and put them together literally as is they was smudge reprints and or degradations of one another, not exact mirror images as on the whole there is not an exact mirror of every single panel
But what about the text?
The opportunity to address the story behind the story is one that is impossible to ignore - this is something that is very much in the now, in fashion, under discussion and makes perfect sense - as the mirror is inverted into itself we cant help but see and be revealed the creation underneath and the pain its creators have gone through to make it happen
I have questions, burning questions which deserve a voice and have a perfect place within the narrative so of course I will assume the form of The Blot who is investigating the death of moral integrity. The Blot is inspired by the questions....
Given that in the narrative I will be portrayed as a sociopath and end up beaten up and arrested for my efforts should prove sufficient enough
Len Wein will feature as the old man who I will roughly question and will inevitably pay the price for saying anything with his life
Dave Gibbons will be the overweight liberal former superhero, rather lonely
Jenette Kahn will be his intended another former superhero, who merely ends up as a source of frustration for Dave
And of course Dan Didio will be the target of an assassin, an assassin who of course Dan kills by giving him a poison capsule, so the assassin can never say it was Dan who hired him all along
Alan Moore wont feature - he is a victim to be sure - but his place is clearly marked. He quite rightly wants nothing to do with this, so at least his opinions I might respect
But so we are clear I clearly state that this work is a trademark and copyright of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, not anyone else be they living dead, animal, mineral or vegetable
In terms of does this mean this work will ever be completed - who can say - I certainly have the physical ability, so the rest is up to serendipity and the hope that I will not be sued out of existence, I don't have deep pockets so it wouldn't take much. But I take the view that its more likely that they wont care or even know this is happening and if they do...
Do I care if this effectively means I will never get work with a major comic book company?
No I feel that some things are more important than that and to have free speech and to openly question the motivations around individuals whom are willingly or otherwise responsible for the state of comics today is something that needs doing before its too late
I feel that they need the mirror turned on them, I want them to take a long look in that mirror and ask themselves are they doing the right thing. Not the legally correct thing mind, no the morally and ethically right thing. I mean effectively how can you on one hand support “truth, justice and the american way” while in reality you support what amounts to slavery or any number of other things equally unethically unsound. And just saying “those are the breaks the people concerned knew what they was getting into”, please - just crawl under the rock you came from and stay there as that has to rate as the biggest amount of horses*** I have ever heard
There is no justification, other than what they can lie about - and these people are lying to themselves just as much as everyone else, they deserve their place on the sick raft borne onto a dead shark as that’s where they are - yeah they didn't just jump the shark they had to go and kill it as well
Sure they can make money, but not at the expense of everything else, especially creativity itself - otherwise the money will eventually stop, right?
Thus we have “What Men”?
As that is the overriding question I have - what men are there in charge of comics today?
If the measure of a man (or woman) is their deeds and their morality then I find most of these individuals severely lacking
If this is the price of fame - then count me out
We start with the cover...
Which is almost all entirely a reflection in water (the ocean which the horrific raft must cross)
A skull and cross bones clearly suggests pirates
And death
Also this can be said to represent the horrific raft which we will see as we progress
The “sail” of the raft is 2 R’s Inverted or mirroring each other suggestion a character whose name begins with R could well be the subject
We have a discarded newspaper, as well as featuring a map that looks familiar (set on fire in protest at the pointlessness of having a big group of so called super heroes featured earlier in the story), is also the favourite publication of the character whose name begins with R
We have discarded Gunga diner box, thrown on the floor even though it still contains rice - one could argue that this represents much, much later - (See Chapter 12)
There is lots of rain but two splashes in particular form a very precise and unlikely to happen for real pattern, they are both semi Smilies (the splash of rain to replace the splash of blood), they also look a lot more like a radar pattern
The X of the bones (for Chapter X) further suggests this is exactly what they are supposed to be - the cover of chapter x features a very close match to either one of these splashes
In this image alone a large range of the entire story is covered , if one knows what to look for
Of course we also see the hat of the protagonist of the story, who I have already described as The Blot
Join me next week as we enter inside and the story proper begins...
