An odd confluence of media input led me to what may be an insight today. I was flipping through Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music, then went and listened to King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black while reading the Coober Skeeber “Marvel Benefit Issue.” Suddenly it occurred to me: Could the cartoonists of Fort Thunder (the art-school collective that included Brian Ralph, Mat Brinkman, and others, and has come to be associated with Highwater Books and the NON and Kramers Ergot anthologies) be part of the pasticheur tradition to which Eno and Ferry and possibly Fripp (not to mention Bowie) belong?
The F.T. cartoonists do wear their influences on their sleeves, as did early Roxy and Eno; Kirby and Panter are the most obvious ones, but I’m sure there are a good many fine-art figures that I’m unaware of. Several of them are obviously still steeped in the stuff they loved as kids, stuff that’s now disregarded by the cognoscenti; Brian Chippendale, for example, still loves Daredevil, and there’s a fantasy/D&D aesthetic that a bunch of the FT guys clearly still dig.
But like Roxy and Bowie, Fort Thunder take recognizable elements from the past, not to parody, but to incorporate and experiment with. (The glam rockers’ “outmoded” influences were obvious–pop melodies, R&B/soul singers, Hollywood icons–while someone like Fripp’s were less so, perhaps, but there’s undeniably an incorporation of funk, jazz, even Looney-Tunes soundtracks in Crimso’s music.) Moreover, they do so with what Roxy producer (and Crimson lyricist) Pete Sinfield called “naivete”–the simple joy of putting the moving parts together in a new fashion and seeing where it goes. Think of Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, Here Come the Warm Jets, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Diamond Dogs–simultaneously literate and tongue-in-cheek, ambitious and a lark, rigorously thought-out and exuberantly rough around the edges.
I’m not impressed by all of the Fort Thunder artists equally, and indeed I sometimes think that this or that comic (or whatever) by them and/or their fellow travelers is downright overrated. But from an artistic perspective, Fort Thunder’s work is more immediately exciting than virutally any other current comics I can think of. Like those early-70s pasticheurs, FT creates a sensation that everything’s up for grabs and anything goes–it’s like taking physical exhiliaration and grafting it into your brain.
To quote the Joker, “I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it.”