Not sure what I was getting at with this one, other than a play on the tensions in strips that employ frames with no dialog. One of my favorite things about looking for 'latentnarratives' vertical comics is finding several consecutive frames of physical comedy. It's not a common as I'd like, but a frame from Peanuts showing a character getting their head 'bonked' by a football followed by a character from Beetle Bailey falling from a tree and hitting the ground with a 'thump' followed by a character from Shoe stepping onto a loose board that hits them in the face with a 'thwack' shows that the universe is aligned that day when it comes to classic physical comedy. It's satisfying to enjoy the weird pull of context-free moments from disparate sources that all relate in a weird way, and especially so if the message is conveyed entirely without language.
So, here I suppose I'm paying homage to this sensation, and I imagine the frames weren't planned ahead but rather pulled together by an honestly random process from the four original strips.
As for the title, I don't remember if there is any logic to it that relates to the strip. I have a set of antique stereoscopic cards, as well as an antique stereoscopic viewer. I'm guessing these date back to the 20's, if not earlier. There is a set of cards from Japan, depicting life in that culture; there is a set of cards from the great San Francisco earthquake (1906) depicting the destruction; there is a set showing the great wild lands west of the Mississippi and the native people who inhabit it.
One card always stood out for me, however. It showed a number of cowboys on horseback gathered in a semi-circle around a tall tree, and suspended from that tree is a lone figure, hung by his neck with hands bound. This card was titled "The Necktie Party."
This stood out because of the casualness with which this execution was depicted on what I took to be a travelogue device (though this also reveals my naivte, as it was also a documentary mechanism ... and it also shows that my concept of propriety when it comes to showing someone's death is a product of my own culture and may not apply to something created in the early 20th century) and also shocking that the title was a crassly dismissive euphemism of the act itself. These days I am skeptical to believe that the execution was 'justified' (if there ever is such a thing), being that I know nothing of the life of the tiny figure rendered on this 3D card that I can barely bring into focus. This was on act of countless others that happened to be photographed and printed, and then hand-colored. Here, in my collection, rendered with the same regard as a collapsed building in San Francisco, and a Japanese gardner in robe tending to his plants.
So, that phrase, "Necktie Party", is always on the periphery of my consciousness as a reminder to myself that there are a lot of things off with this world, and the silence that accompanies it - the silence that I still hear as I read the title and began to process the image, and then suddenly realize what the title implied (in all its dimensions) - is something that should be paid attention to. And not broken.
Not sure what I was getting at with this one, other than a play on the tensions in strips that employ frames with no dialog. One of my favorite things about looking for 'latentnarratives' vertical comics is finding several consecutive frames of physical comedy. It's not a common as I'd like, but a frame from Peanuts showing a character getting their head 'bonked' by a football followed by a character from Beetle Bailey falling from a tree and hitting the ground with a 'thump' followed by a character from Shoe stepping onto a loose board that hits them in the face with a 'thwack' shows that the universe is aligned that day when it comes to classic physical comedy. It's satisfying to enjoy the weird pull of context-free moments from disparate sources that all relate in a weird way, and especially so if the message is conveyed entirely without language.
ReplyDeleteSo, here I suppose I'm paying homage to this sensation, and I imagine the frames weren't planned ahead but rather pulled together by an honestly random process from the four original strips.
As for the title, I don't remember if there is any logic to it that relates to the strip. I have a set of antique stereoscopic cards, as well as an antique stereoscopic viewer. I'm guessing these date back to the 20's, if not earlier. There is a set of cards from Japan, depicting life in that culture; there is a set of cards from the great San Francisco earthquake (1906) depicting the destruction; there is a set showing the great wild lands west of the Mississippi and the native people who inhabit it.
One card always stood out for me, however. It showed a number of cowboys on horseback gathered in a semi-circle around a tall tree, and suspended from that tree is a lone figure, hung by his neck with hands bound. This card was titled "The Necktie Party."
This stood out because of the casualness with which this execution was depicted on what I took to be a travelogue device (though this also reveals my naivte, as it was also a documentary mechanism ... and it also shows that my concept of propriety when it comes to showing someone's death is a product of my own culture and may not apply to something created in the early 20th century) and also shocking that the title was a crassly dismissive euphemism of the act itself. These days I am skeptical to believe that the execution was 'justified' (if there ever is such a thing), being that I know nothing of the life of the tiny figure rendered on this 3D card that I can barely bring into focus. This was on act of countless others that happened to be photographed and printed, and then hand-colored. Here, in my collection, rendered with the same regard as a collapsed building in San Francisco, and a Japanese gardner in robe tending to his plants.
So, that phrase, "Necktie Party", is always on the periphery of my consciousness as a reminder to myself that there are a lot of things off with this world, and the silence that accompanies it - the silence that I still hear as I read the title and began to process the image, and then suddenly realize what the title implied (in all its dimensions) - is something that should be paid attention to. And not broken.