Episode Eighty-One: Art & Guy.
While Oats is having a banality fitted, we present the fourth of the 4 original strips that comprised "Query Expressions" (Episode 71). Originally published Feb 29,2018, in the Quechee Picayune-Emetic. Reprinted with permission.
While Oats is having a banality fitted, we present the fourth of the 4 original strips that comprised "Query Expressions" (Episode 71). Originally published Feb 29,2018, in the Quechee Picayune-Emetic. Reprinted with permission.
'Art & Guy', the fourth strip from the newspaper the 'Quechee Picayune-Emetic'. Panels from this strip inhabit the fourth panel of the Latent Narratives strip, and usually represent a positive meditative response (though often inscrutable) to the preceding panels. It is not unusual for the response to be drawn from the Oblique Strategies deck, if nothing else from my life has come forward to offer inspiration.
ReplyDeleteS.P. Guy ("Self Portrait Guy") is a character I've drawn for decades, a sad-sack milquetoast with a question mark in the center of his head. The Art character is the (copyright infringing, undoubtedly) Peter Schmidt portrait of Brian Eno from the cover of 'Before and After Science' (1977). I so love that image, and hope Schmidt understands what it represents to me, wherever he may now be.
I see the 'Art & Guy' strip as reminiscent of Herriman's 'Krazy Kat' (early 20th c.): there's an unresolved tension between Guy and Art. Guy is always trying to normalize or work this tension through, but Art will never let it happen - Art is too elusive and subversive. Art plays the role of the trickster in a way that is not beneficial to Guy's development: it is always just a harmful, bad joke on him. There is an irony that the panel is used in Latent Narratives to represent resolution when the strip itself is usually a representation of unresolved conflict.