Gott Complex vs. Scenius

"...scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work."

Brian Eno

"I often hear people talking about looking at original art and saying, 'It's just great, there's no White-Out at all.' I find that an odd comment."

Dan Clowes

Blaise was part of a panel at the Stumptown Comics Fest called Young Lions. It wasn't very illuminating, but a question was asked of Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino of Secret Acres, about what kind of comics they were interested in publishing; they said that (and I'm paraphrasing) they were mainly looking for people who both wrote and drew their books entirely, that they weren't going for "team comics," meaning books with separate artists and writers. This evinced a bias that runs pretty deep in art-indie-alternative-whatever comics cirles - the creator as auteur.

It immediately made me want to collaborate on a book, to make something like Crumb and Pekar, Carver and Lish.



I think it's perceived that one of the strengths of comics is that they're the work of individual creators realizing their own singular visions. It's rooted, maybe, in the way cartoonists have signature styles and build organic worlds out of the language and imagery they choose.



Also on the panel was Theo Ellsworth who talked about how he'd like to make a physical artists' book and reproduce it exactly for the printed object. Is it better to be more authentic and hew closer to the original work or does the plasticity of print allow for new things to be created in the pre-press and printing stages? Is the printed object a representation of something else or the final work?



One of my favorite comics of all time is Panter's Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, which was seemingly a patchwork affair, heavily edited by Spiegelman and Mouly. Spiegelman says:

"For everybody we published, we'd be pain in the ass. For Gary as well, encouraging a more specific narrative trajectory. For better or for worse, it was always fun to see how [people] ignored it. I remember putting together the Jimbo book, of the pages he had done for Slash, and adding more things into that where I'd say, "You know, there are twelve places where you just totally drop the continuity of an idea, maybe you'd wanna consider doing some pages to pull some of that back together." And then he'd do it, but while solving the problems that were specifically listed, he'd create fifteen other narrative disconnects in the course of the page, and I was like, "Well, maybe that's great." We were glad to see it. Part of the reason perhaps that I now tremble when I think of being a comics editor is that I'm kind of a busybody that way."



Jack Survives is something else that benefitted (I think) from Artie's meddling. The RAW version is much more graphic and readable than the McSweeney's book, which is more faithful to the original art.



Is it hubris on our part as cartoonists to want to be the hero, control the final product or should we recognize that art is a collaboration with reality, that the "ecology of talent" (as Eno calls it) can produce great work?