This began as a series of inspiring screenshots from Dead Reckoning (1947), a Bogart Noir with luscious visuals. I had little more than that when I began working on it Friday evening, but I soon began liking the incongruity between the simplicity of Noir-ish toughness against the complexity of any technical subject investigated in depth.
This is my every day, tired story, and ever present: people don’t want to hear that something is complex. Ironically, it’s this turning away from complexity, the demand for simplicity, that leads to the increasing complexity of everything around us.
So the joke, here, is that the tough guy is delivering a satisfying noir punch line along the lines of ‘go ahead, make my day.’ He’s taunting his enemy at gunpoint, perhaps even as he is about to kill him. He’s saying that this guy’s platonic solid is coffin-shaped, except he’s doing so in a manner that is so esoteric that it’s just confusing, and so ultimately not satisfying.
Except that it would be to an ancient history maths nerd, and that’s the part that delights me. The idea that there’s a universe in which there’s a maths detective noir strip, and it has a niche audience. This does work for Sci Fi, and also some Comics communities. But in this case, it just feels off.
So there’s that: it’s opaque in a genre that is traditionally straightforward.
Criterion is featuring Mike Leigh at the moment, and watching his work has me thinking of his directing style and his trust in the truth of the moment. I’ve edited out an essay of theory here, but basically it’s about Leigh’s trusting in the process of pulling a truth from the moment … a process that, for him, requires bypassing the conscious judgment of what one is doing.
In the case of this comic, the end result occurred outside of my planning, and so the process of repetition is producing a muscle memory that I hadn’t anticipated. This week was evidence that sometimes the universe is brewing and forming outside of my own awareness. I was very happy with how this turned out.
This began as a series of inspiring screenshots from Dead Reckoning (1947), a Bogart Noir with luscious visuals. I had little more than that when I began working on it Friday evening, but I soon began liking the incongruity between the simplicity of Noir-ish toughness against the complexity of any technical subject investigated in depth.
ReplyDeleteThis is my every day, tired story, and ever present: people don’t want to hear that something is complex. Ironically, it’s this turning away from complexity, the demand for simplicity, that leads to the increasing complexity of everything around us.
So the joke, here, is that the tough guy is delivering a satisfying noir punch line along the lines of ‘go ahead, make my day.’ He’s taunting his enemy at gunpoint, perhaps even as he is about to kill him. He’s saying that this guy’s platonic solid is coffin-shaped, except he’s doing so in a manner that is so esoteric that it’s just confusing, and so ultimately not satisfying.
Except that it would be to an ancient history maths nerd, and that’s the part that delights me. The idea that there’s a universe in which there’s a maths detective noir strip, and it has a niche audience. This does work for Sci Fi, and also some Comics communities. But in this case, it just feels off.
So there’s that: it’s opaque in a genre that is traditionally straightforward.
Criterion is featuring Mike Leigh at the moment, and watching his work has me thinking of his directing style and his trust in the truth of the moment. I’ve edited out an essay of theory here, but basically it’s about Leigh’s trusting in the process of pulling a truth from the moment … a process that, for him, requires bypassing the conscious judgment of what one is doing.
In the case of this comic, the end result occurred outside of my planning, and so the process of repetition is producing a muscle memory that I hadn’t anticipated. This week was evidence that sometimes the universe is brewing and forming outside of my own awareness. I was very happy with how this turned out.