"He Devil Among Us" :// Remix Manifesto

And when you've tired of that issue, of that series, of that longbox --

-- (poorly written, formulaic comics, entirely the same exact thing as you put your money out for last month or last week or whatever) --

-- you can keep a hold on it until it calcifies and its panels are the work of dust and time as well as artists.

Or you can cut it up. Cut holes in your comic books. Cut windows to other dimensions.

You can use exacto knives or the sharp ends of paper clips, at least you can if it's printed on the thin cheap glossy Marvel paper, or you can use something as crude and primal as a kitchen knife or as advanced as a computer. They can even make bombs with computers now.

You lay it on a flat surface and slice through all four colors, whether they're made out of pixels or benday dots.

There is no excuse for accepting something subpar. There's no one who will change something you think is mediocre into something that speaks to you or something that you think is beautiful or something innovative or whatever unless you do it yourself.

You rid it of the word balloons where characters say things like "NO" or "FACE IT, TIGER" or "THANKS -- FRIEND." You rid it of any word balloon that doesn't say something you want to say. You make it silent, and then you turn up the volume.

Rip holes in it with your fingers, if you have to.

You are writing the comic. You are drawing with a knife, pencil, ink, and color all at once. It can say whatever you want it to say. It can look however you want it to look. There is liberation in the blade. There is freedom in destruction. There is destruction in creation.

Let the comic speak to you. Let it take you where you want it to go.

You didn't like that panel? Take it out and throw it in the paper-recycling bin. You didn't like that thought balloon? Just murder it.

You carve at the art, you savage the repetition of same-sized panels and medium-shot figure drawings. You find the beauty lurking in the corners, in the spotted black of a shadow, in the ink stipple on a metal surface.

(It's like you learned in medical school or playing doctor when you were a kid or whatever. If there is something bothering you, you cut it out.)

You make those beauties speak for themselves and you don't give a thought to what they're saying, because this is art and a beautiful panel is like a beautiful person and you're taking the comic to bed and you don't care what comes out of a beauty's mouth in that situation. In that situation the beauty itself is all that matters.

So take it, baby, take it out of the polybag and backing board and cut it up. You can store your cutting equipment in the polybag. You can use the backing board as a surface, use it up until it looks like this:



Cut it until you can't remember the mediocre lines, the average bits of art, the story that you feel like you've read before, like you've read a million times or more. Cut until you have made something beautiful to hang on your wall or line the birdcages with or put back in that longbox to reread for the very first time.

Just let it be art, just let it be freedom, just let it be something unlike anything you've been part of before. This is a new art form. This is a new way of reading. This is a new kind of comic. Just let it be what comes NEXT.

Or whatever.

*

Alex Maleev's Daredevil was the first comic I bought for the art alone. It wasn't necessarily that his art spoke to me above that of anybody else, but in those Bill Jemas days Morrison was writing the Quitelys and Milligan was writing the Allreds, so I bought their books for script as well. Maleev, on the other hand, was a master talent hacking it out for a poorly written soap opera. To watch his development on that book is stunning -- he goes from a scratchy (if talented) photo-referencer to a half Sean Phillips, half Guido Crepax virtuoso. But to read those comics as you watch him develop is to mire yourself in the doldrums of a mid-level 2000s Marvel book and its endless layers of meaninglessness.

So Maleev was the ideal candidate for one of these "cut-mixes" from the beginning, chiefly because I wanted to free that gorgeous art from those terrible scripts, but also -- his style is perfect for these things. I really wanted to get my hands on an early issue in his run, one of the ones colored by Matt Hollingsworth almost entirely in shades of gray. To cut windows into those grays, crisscrossed by Maleev's scissor-sharp parallel lines, and to leave them completely alone on the pages of a comic. I still may.



But what I ended up with was a later issue of his Daredevil, #72, with Dave Stewart colors and a sparer, more evolved drawing style. Gone are the fields of dense linework, replaced with chiaroscuro spotted blacks and adventurous stretches of blank space, which fill up not with Hollingsworth grays but with Stewart's trademark dirty pastels. Blacks, grouped into beautiful pictures, and lakes of pure color; I could have made a hole anywhere in this comic and and opened it up onto something beautiful. Here's an example.



Every mark Maleev makes is special, is important, can be seen as art on its own in the right context. What follows is simply an exhibition I curated.

*

One of the biggest attractions of the "cut-mix", at least for writerly types like me, is that not only can you dictate the story, the story becomes so abstracted that you can dictate it with exactly as much detail as you like. In as many different versions as you like. Below are three versions of the story that immediately follows, which is entitled "He Devil Among Us".

(click on the image to view it full-sized)



1) The man in the eyepatch hires the other man to blow up Matt Murdock's (aka Daredevil's) house, which is situated above Josie's Bar & Grill. The deed is accomplished, but the man in the eyepatch has rigged it so that the trigger man is caught and incarcerated. The dirt is done, and the man in the eyepatch doesn't have to pay anyone for it in the end.

2) The man in the eyepatch's father is the other man. He has been in prison for the past 15 years, since the man in the eyepatch was a young boy. He never told anyone what crime he was convicted of. The man in the eyepatch worked in Matt Murdock's law office, but was fired for improprieties. Only afterwards does he learn that his father was imprisoned for blowing up Murdock's penthouse during the time when rumors were flying around that Murdock was secretly Daredevil.

3) The man in the eyepatch is the other man's parole officer. He is also a psychotic sadist who takes pleasure in tormenting his clients and their families. The other man's wife and son know their patriarch is mentally ill, but they do not know quite what his reasoning was for committing the bombing that sent him to prison. The other man's son has been suffering nervous attacks and believes he may have inherited his father's mental illness, which he does not know the extent of. The man in the eyepatch tells the son that the reason his father bombed a Clinton-area penthouse in 1994 was to kill Daredevil, aka Matt Murdock. This revelation sends the boy into a spiral of fear and despair, because his father's mental illness stands revealed as deep and serious -- Matt Murdock and Daredevil are fictional characters.

Original art par Alex Maleev {2005}, cut-mix par Scyzoryk {2010}