#gendocybin

FAN ART for @mercurialblonde 's Gendocybin.

Gendocybin #1 by Sarah Horrocks

Haven’t written about comics in a while. It is such a wonderful medium. So different from film or novels. Don’t seem like people really get that (read/watch “Watchmen” for example). The thing about comics (thought of this watching “Celine and Julie Go Boating” the other day) is that the cut is so utterly different from films. The way you cut from one take/scene/angle to another is in no way the same. And in both movies and comics (and poetry, and everything) the cut is fundamental. It is the rhythm of what you are saying.

Sarah Horrocks is really good at rhythm. Rhythm and colors, I feel, are her biggest strengths. 

There is no “correct” rhythm of course (I might be persuaded to have a different idea about colors). Compare (personal favorites) “Lone Wolf and Cub” and Gilbert Hernandez’ stories. Like different galaxies, both great. 

Horrocks does something different though (Hernandez and Kojima/Koike are very measured), both between images and within them. There is a violent chaos here. Something very personal, very intimate, and at the same time very pulp. This combination is important (and very much something I enjoy). I don’t think you can really say something personal and political today outside of pulp. I think pulp is what is left of anything truthful in storytelling. It wasn’t. But it is. Lots of people misunderstand this. Seeing pulp (shorthand here, be it Conan, superheroes, gore, manga, etc.) as lowbrow, low quality, whatever. Going so far as trying to “rescue” artists from pulp (Cronenberg, Lynch, Burroughs, Ballard, Guston, etc). 

The chaos in Gendocybin is part of the violence which is the inspiration (not the right word, see her afterword) for the comic. It is an end-of-the-world thing. It is a violence so enormous that it cannot but invade every fiber of the storytelling. Like when they don’t just kill you (or at least try to), they want you to never have been. It is the nazi ultimate solution, it is a level of evil that we probably cannot understand. And we are living it. Now. Can it be “understood?” Is that the point? 

It isn’t the point of the comic. It is about living it. Surviving it. But what are you surviving? How can you even? And I am totally going to far here, this is #1 of an ongoing series. I have no idea where this will go.