Laughing at the Asteroid

A Hello You

This was supposed to go out last weekend, but it was my girlfriend’s Birthday and we celebrated by climbing a some mountains in the Lake District. I had never climbed Scafell Pike before, so we thought it would be a cool idea to go up there on Saturday. I do not wish to dwell on the negative about what was an excellent weekend, but the ascent up England’s highest mountain was a real peek behind the curtain at people’s relationship with the countryside. The peak was like an Ikea forecourt.

Other than that it was nice to be in nature for a few days especially when the weather was being so kind to us. We found two great locations for swimming and the Birthday girl took some amazing photographs.

Did you know my girlfriend is an extremely talented photographer? She focuses on Landscapes and nature photography hoping to capture the joy she gains from the Country in her pictures. I think that her immersion in the subjects, the way she takes photos from inside rivers and lakes, and having hiked to locations people rarely climb to adds a dynamism to her work that I really enjoy. But I may be biased. You should absolutely check out her photography here. 

Good Evening, and Welcome to Nick Gonzo's mailing list.

A Very Academic bit.

I have shouted about an important bit of news on my measly social media presence but as that constitutes at present a very private Facebook, an under-subscribed Blue Sky account, and a rarely updated Instagram you might not have heard my news.

Leeds Beckett made the wild and possibly ill-advised decision to give me a scholarship to pursue a PhD in the impact that Non-Programmatic arts interventions can have on improving Mental Wellbeing.

In short this means I am going to develop a framework of workshops and activities to help communities create art groups that will as a by product of people participating improve their mental health. My focus will be on Zines and Comics as this is most definitely my background. I start officially in October, but as I’ve basically been doing this without writing it up since 2019 I have a lot of ground already covered. My favourite part of it so far has been creating a research team to help me with my studies and I’ve had the ability to put together my own Design Think Tank. Will the power go to my head? I hope so.

Social prescribing is on the increase in the UK as the underfunded Mental Health facilities of the NHS struggle to treat people being crushed under the heal of the same system that’s under funding it. Social Prescribing is the act of referring a person to a community group or alternative therapy either instead of or to supplement traditional mental health treatment. So for example, you could go to the Doctor and tell them you’re depressed and they could recommend some mindful painting. You could go to the Doctors with depression and they could recommend a talking group like Andy’s man club. You could go to the doctors with depression and they recommend you go and see the great clown Pagliacci. This is Social Prescribing.

However my view point is that in order to benefit from Social Prescribing you need to have realised you’re in crisis, and further to that in order to benefit from the arts based programmes you need to be open to doing a class in Mindful painting. It all sounds very middle class retirement home. My research hopes to have communities create their own casual art clubs that are geared around getting people to think about their emotions. Stealthily get people to open up. A trojan horse of self reflection.

I expect you will hear more about this in the coming FIVE YEARS as I refuse to shut up about it now and I haven’t started it yet.

Before we get to the long bit, this newsletter relies on word of mouth. On people enjoying it telling other people. So if you think this is super awesome good, then please, tell your friends.

At parties, on Facebook, leaning out of a speeding car as you drive through a town centre and shout.

Any of these methods.

Please.

Inaction Man

I had quite a lot of time on my hands this week and watched a lot of films. One of those films was a film about films called The Story of Film; a New Generation (2021) a documentary during which the soft voiced film critic Mark Cousins talks about films of the new school who push the language of cinema or develop a new language for it to follow. This quote stood out for me:

Quite often when I talk about the literature I read I describe them as books about nothing in particular. Aside from a large chapter of non-stop action in its middle the 1985 book by Don DeLillo White Noise is a book about nothing, a rambling account of the lives of a small town family and its academic narrator. The Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 45 is a Shaggy Dog story about secret societies that starts nowhere and ends there. But there’s a vast difference between making a book about nothing in particular and one that’s about very little and takes its time to get there.

Slow films, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) as pictured above, or Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019) are both films with simplistic premises in terms of narrative but really don’t mind taking their time to very slowly get there. I think of the two minute scene of floor sweeping in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) as the prime example of slowness in film. just taking time out from the story, the action, to contrast it with inaction. I think its a uniquely filmic thing, as with books and comics the rate at which someone takes in the pages and panels is outside of the hands of the creator. A film is as long as the film is.

I was talking to someone recently and they described it as overly intellectual directors poking fun at an audience with their insider knowledge of film. I think this is an overly cynical way of looking at what is effectively the process of making art. Art is textural. Film is textural, in terms of sound, vision, and movement. What we see, how we see it, and how we feel when we view it. A slow pan with a constant droning violin sequence will build tension. A shot of someone sweeping the floor for a long time might help meditate the tension out of the audience. I’ve seen enough Marvel CGI fight scenes last upwards of 30 minutes. What’s a two minute sweeping sequence between friends.

It made me think about the idea of Inaction Comics. Why aren’t there more comic books about nothing? Where are my slow comics at? The first thing that leapt to my mind was this amazing joke thrown into the graphic novel Ed the Happy Clown, by Chester Brown. A graphic novel that most definitely cannot be described as slow or about nothing.

But the interesting thing about this joke is the way it just interrupts the surreal and violent narrative narrative of Chester Browns train of consciousness improve comic. It takes us out, and the checker board of repeated panels controls the flow of the reader and forces you even by our own measure of time to slow down. Its right back into a world of cannibalism, murder, and talking penises after this, but for a moment we have this slow joke.

I think another comic that really plays with this concept of inactivity and nothingness is Ghost World by Daniel Clowes (mentioning Daniel Clowes in a blog post is likely to be on your Nick Gonzo bingo card so please cross it off now) which is very much the mumble core movie equivalent of a comic book. Lacking a beginning or a middle its the story of two friends in a state of social decay as they slowly drift apart and talk about friendship, growing up, and the crap suburb they live in. The form doesn’t promote the idea of space, there are no long sequences of silence or repeated panels here, but the art, framing and story telling is one of space and slowness. No one is in a rush to get anywhere, likely reflecting the core premise that the characters are frightened of change.

The last two comics I have to talk about in terms of Slow comics, do so entirely in a textural way. Both are abstract though one is significantly more abstract than the other. Firstly there is Zara Slattery’s Coma, and then we have Too Dry To Haunt by Gareth Hopkins.

Coma is the story of how Zara Slattery bumped her leg and ended up in a coma. It is a story about how the mundane can quickly evolve into the monstrous as she develops necrotising fasciitis and spends 15 days in a medicated coma as people battle to save her life. Its also about her husband Dan trying to keep their family life together as this nightmare unfolds. Told from Dan’s perspective via his diary he kept of events and told from within the coma itself in the dreamscape of Zara’s fevered visions, its a surreal combination of the real and the unreal. But what I love about the book is how the surreal elements do not attempt to add an imposed narrative. Zara doesn’t imagine herself battling a monster in a fictional land trying to get home to family from Coma-Land which as I write it sounds like a Sandman story line, instead it a collage of creatures, landscapes, and impossible architecture. But one that has a gentleness to it that creates a sense of loss not panic. Long wordless passages are there for you to create your own pace to and as they come interwoven with the more text dense diary pages it changes the way you view both.

This abstraction has a lot in common with the hugely varied work of Gareth Hopkins, a creator who I first heard of as he was doing abstract redraws of 2000ad pages. At least I think that’s how I first heard of him. I could be making it up. I have quite a few of his abstract comics, including The Intercorstal 683 and the bumper huge collection Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors which houses ten of his comics in one door stop of a book.

What I think makes Gareth the master of the slow comic format is that he doesn’t try and tell you a story in any way that really lends itself to a comic book. we have panels and text boxes, sure, but he makes comic books in the same way Max Ernst created the first Graphic novel. Its sequential art. Art works we view in a sequence that then create a narrative. His words are poems, his artworks layers of sedimentary lines creating an epoch of story. The lack of traditional comic book markers leaves the reader rudderless. No one is telling you how to read it. There are no visual keys to lead you by the hand and tell you how fast or how slow to go, and for me this means take your time. In my favourite page of Too Dry To Haunt a white panel cuts across a patterned and heavy page, the text dead centre, an inversion of the art crammed panel in the white gutters we are used to. It invites us to stop and feel the cold emptiness of the lack of image. The words read “I went to a castle and almost fainted”.

You can read it and many more of Gareth’s comics for free here.

In summary I think that there needs to be more comics that aren’t afraid to have very little going on. Very little going on in comics traditionally means a bunch of talking heads furthering the story, but instead I’d like to see a sequence of Superman washing his hands halfway through a story about Mister Mxyzptlk. There is a page in All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely where Superman lands on a building to hug a suicidal girl and tell her things can get better. Its heralded as one of the greatest moments in comic book history. A defining moment for the character. I do not feel like what I am suggesting is completely outside of the realms of possibility.

I challenge you, reader, to come up with something and muse on slow comics. Or slow books. Or slow films. Or just slowness as a whole. Let us be Inactive.

I’ve said too much, I must go.

Until next time

Nick