Arts: Cartooning: Blank Page Comics co-op online amuses, abuses, confuses ... maybe

Today, I stumbled onto the website of Blank Label Comics. I was fascinated by the the project of a handful of cartoonists / comic strippers. They've created a genuine work-community of independent artists; but not unqualifiedly so, now that they've developed a way of combining and exchanging skills with one another - just to keep the ensemble busy in their individual specialist artistic vocations. The artists and their serial works of comic strips available on line are: Kristofer Straub (Checkerboard Nightmare; Starshift Crisis); Brad J. Guigar (Courting Disaster; Greystone Inn); David Willis (It's Walky!; Shortpacked!); Paul Southworth (Krazy Larry; Ugly Hill); Steve Troop (Melonpool); Paul Taylor (Wapsi Square). Not being able to review the whole lot, and not willing to go phishing to come up with something that I could possibly denounce for immorality or some form of deviance, I decided to choose randomly one comic strip, and begin at its beginnings in the archive, and look at it / read it till I got a first sense of what the artist's vision is and what some of his skills are. I was delited with this sounding.

I selected the work of Brad J. Guigar, one of the group's diehards, and took the time to go back in his archives to the first daily strip of Feb 17 (Sundays are in color) and read there the usually 4-pane panel of the series Greystone Inn, in which Argus T. Gorgoyle, a sort of pudgy shmoo-like bat with, of course, wings; or bat-like shmoo with wingy obtrusions (but I've never seen him fly). We get to know this guy, this character. And it's true that Guigar delites in creating characters, all as different from one another as he can draw them and fill their talk-balloons with distinct imaginal mentalities to complement their looks. This all takes place on the set of the cartoon, a movie-like set of the Greystone Inn. The device of the set and movie-like accoutrements allows Guigar to keep increasing his cast of characters, and to have his Producer periodically interview a potential new one who's hustling for a job to keep working in the bis.

Thus, a zippy new character can do a lively walk-on and then promptly disappear....forever? Content, as well, is developed by this device. At first, in trying to find the direction of the strip or its internal niches, the variorum inside of and structuring the story-line, we're told tentatively at one point that the goal of this strip is or ought to become a comic soap-opera strip. But it's Gargoyle, the first character that we get to know, who wants less soap and more gags, one-liners and sightjokes - humour, in its most direct, visceral sense - so as to bring out the comic in the comic strip. This is a tension unresolved when abruptly a certain H. Ross Peroach approaches the Producer (there also is the Narrator, just a voice in a line box whose behavior constitutes an arcane reference to pomo litcrit's interminable discussions of "the narrator" in the Western literary tradition, implying there's something deeply faux and phoney about such a device). Several things are always going on at a given "time." Guigar's Narrator is a kind of voice-over without embodiment, just obtruding words, but very postmodernly this Narrator sometimes also addresses characters or replies to them "directly." Good fun!

Oh, did I mention that Mr Peroach is a cockroach who now remarks "Ever since NAFTA" (er, the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, USA, and Mexico) "all the good cockroach jobs have gone to Tijuana." At that point, the Producer appears with a long-armed .... it turns out to be a long-armed vacuum cleaner (Wed, April 12, 2000) which is used to suck up H. Ross into the vacuum bag. This effort at extermination does not quite work, too mechanical. The character is soon back in play. Peroach comments on the comics industry in presenting how his character meets the demand of an increasing interest burgeoning within the market; he (alone) can supply the demand of a now-discernible market niche. Pointing to his chart, Ross tells the Producer, "This is my popularity with males 18-31. And here's my marketability quotient for fiscal '99..." The Producer shows Peroach a map of the site, and points to the Exit. As Peroach trudges along on his walk of defeat, who shows up but Argus? (that's a rhetorical question mark only ... please don't email me on that one!).

The plot thickens, and by Friday, April 28, 2000, the Narrator summarizes for us the foregoing developments to date; we're told that MacKensie, the Producer, "has just confessed to Argus that the Syndicate has used the Gargoyle's hair samples and a scrap of his boxer shorts [collected by the Producer himself] to create a Franken-zombie to carry on if the star dies ..." The plot thickens again, slowly but ever more densely; and on Friday, June 2, 200 > the babe appears! Cindy-Kate. At that point, my duties called me away from Greystone Inn and the creativity of Brad J. Guigar.

I'll probably take some time again, later on, to work my way along the time-line of the daily 4-panes panels to see what happens after April 8, 2000, what becomes of Argus T. Gargoyle, the Producer MacKensie, Samantha (who I hardly mentioned) and Cindy-Kate ("syndicate" ... got it?). The moral temptation of the free comic-strip artist is to strip him/herself of his inmost daily creations, leaving telltale forensic traces of the artist's self for all the world to see/read; and in that process the greatest temptation is to succumb to the syndicate that keeps open the gate to his strip's daily syndication and access to a readership who can find him and fall in love with his/her work. There's a postmodernist or, at least, a late modernist revelation of the inner workings of the Business. The comic-strip biz is deconstructed gradually and lovingly. You mite enjoy following a fine artist in his very daily, very quotidian work. One thing I missed along the way was the dropping of the large Sunday panels in full color and with a larger space and several more panes than the weekday standard 4 panes in black and white line-drawings. Oh, well ... I've a very long way to go from Friday, June 2, the arrival of Cindy-Kate, to the most uptodate panel Tuesday, May 31, 2005. Brad J. Guigar's Greystone Inn is something like a novel, I'd say. It was Charles Dickens, was it?, who became a novelist by writing daily stories in a continuing series of installments that, when completed, composed a novel. And wasn't he rather looked down upon by the élite recognized novelists because Dickens actually earned his way and proved his creativity in the dailies. Guigar and his companions are doing that now digitally online thru their comic strip. - Owlb

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