"It's all the same," is an argument at the core of the Twentieth Century. We find it in the totalizing narratives of anthropology (Joseph Campbell or Sir James Frazer), and structuralist-inclined psychology (Freud or Jung)-even in notions of art as universal or timeless. But by the second half of the century, artists and critics were no longer convinced that everything was the same, world-over, even if they had gained assurance that as far as pop culture went, the same, over and over and over, was all there was: a uniform dimension of the spectacular, insipid, and unfathomably shallow. Step in, cultural decoders and re-fashioners like Andy Warhol—and prefabricator extraordinaire (and not coincidentally post-FabFour) producer-cum-artist Malcolm McLaren.
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In 2005, the first issue of
Tales Designed to Thrizzle launched into the uncertain graphic novel and comics market. The publisher,
Fantagraphics, eminent in the not-for-children category that emerged from the "underground comics" renaissance, issued the series in traditional fashion. The first five installments of
Tales to Thrizzle, now compiled in
Tales to Thrizzle Volume One, are comic books. Each book consists of a number of stories and segments, all adhering to a single sensibility—the sensibility of the author and artist, Michael Kupperman.
But the
Tales Designed to Thrizzle series is not all tradition; it's largely a satire, a satire of a pulp fiction oeuvre that didn't take itself that seriously to begin with. Kupperman's humor—a mix of genre, non-sequitur and nonsense—is a kind of laughter in the void, wonderfully lucid and slightly sickening.
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