Wasting Time on the Internet (18 page)

These works are meant to be quickly favorited, reblogged, and forgotten. They embrace the blips and flickers of the screen, celebrating the life span of a meme as a metric for artistic legacy. Yet the irony is that because the blog ended in 2014, they are now preserved for eternity—or at least until somebody pulls the plug on Tumblr. By then the images hosted there will have been indexed, spidered, and mirrored so many times that their eradication will be virtually impossible, ensuring them a place in a virtual pantheon. In the twentieth century, many artists who claimed to want to burn down museums ended up enshrined in them. The same remains true for the twenty-first: young artists wishing to skirt conventional valorization by the art establishment have, by posting their works on the web, inadvertently become preserved for posterity by the search engine.

Fifty years ago, when Andy Warhol said things like “I want to be a machine” and “It's easier not to care,” he was romanticizing the formal and emotional cleanliness of machine-based production. Humans, after all, court messiness. Warhol's salvo is extended by today's Internet poets, who resemble zombies more than inspired bards, gathering and shoveling hoards of inert linguistic matter into programs, flipping switches, letting it rip, and producing poetry on the scale of WikiLeaks cables. Imagine the writer as a meme machine, writing works with the intention for them to ripple rapidly across networks only to evaporate as quickly
as they appear. Imagine poetry that is vast, instantaneous, horizontal, globally distributed, paper thin, and, ultimately, disposable.

R. Sikoryak is a graphic novelist who has been drawing unoriginal comics for more than a quarter of a century. Inspired by a mix of
Raw
magazine (to which he contributed) and John Cage (he once drew a strip version of Cage's aleatory work
Indeterminacy
), Sikoryak meticulously redraws well-known historical comics and mashes them up with classic works of literature. His book
Masterpiece Comics
includes strange works like Dante's
Inferno
drawn as a series of Bazooka Joe bubblegum comics, and Camus's
The Stranger
as the story line for a
Superman
strip.

His most recent project takes a more conceptual twist. This time, instead of classic literature, he's matched appropriated comics with the complete text of the iTunes Terms and Conditions for a total of seventy pages, published in three comic books. “Instead of taking an important book that no one has read,” Sikoryak says, “I've taken an agreement that none of us have read and have made an unreadable book out of it.” All of the classic comics protagonists—Charlie Brown, Dilbert, Spider-Man, Richie Rich—have been redrawn to resemble Steve Jobs, replete with scraggly beard and round glasses. Each page presents a different car
toon style; every source is cited in a bibliography in the back of the book. There are lovely details: Snoopy's doghouse is branded with an Apple logo; Hellboy, posing as Jobs, is battling a monster listening to an iPod with white earbud cords dangling from his head.

Why would someone want to do this? Sikoryak, when I asked him, had an avant-garde response: “What would be the most absurd text to put into a comic, the least likely thing to do?” He also selected the legal code because—somewhat surprisingly, given the nature of his work—he's never had any legal problems. This got him wondering whether those miles of tiny legal print ever really amount to anything.

Sikoryak's book also speaks to how, after decades of scanning, file sharing, and cutting and pasting, notions of copyright and authorship in the comics world have relaxed. Bill Kartalopoulos, a comics historian and series editor of the
Best American Comics
series, told me that pirating, copying, bootlegging, and plagiarism have been around since the beginning of modern comics history. “The foundational nineteenth-century graphic novels of Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer were pirated in France, England, and elsewhere,” Kartalopoulos says. “At that time, if the French wanted to produce a pirated edition of Töpffer's Swiss book, someone would literally have to redraw and re-engrave his images onto wood blocks. Later, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, small bootleg comic books called ‘Tijuana Bibles'—also referred to at the time as ‘Fuck Books'—were sold under the table, featuring famous cartoon characters like Popeye
and Little Orphan Annie in explicit sexual situations that didn't normally present themselves on the daily newspaper page.”

By the sixties and seventies, with the counterculture in full swing, everyone from the situationists—who whited out speech balloons and filled them with political text—to the Air Pirates, a collective of Bay Area hippies, were copying and repurposing famous comic strips. The Air Pirates adopted the styles of an array of historical cartoonists as their own (including
Krazy Kat
artist George Herriman and turn-of-the-century cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper). In
Air Pirates Funnies
, they took on the Disney entertainment empire and redrew Mickey, Minnie, and company Tijuana Bible–style: smuggling drugs and having orgies. Wanting to stick it to the man, they made sure Disney was aware of their activities. Disney, predictably, sued. They later settled with Air Pirate Dan O'Neill and made him promise never to draw Mickey Mouse again.

Thirty-year-old Blaise Larmee may best exemplify that stick-it-to-the-man attitude. Mostly, he uses web platforms to mess with the comics establishment. Modeling his practice on the situationists, he adores misattribution, altering other people's comics by inserting his own texts into speech balloons, which end up getting reblogged as authentic artifacts. He once pretended he was named editor for
Best American Comics
and posted his announcement on a bogus Chris Ware Tumblr he created. He added a note that promised: “If you reblog this Tumblr image, your work will be included
in the book.” Asked why he does these things, he answers, “Because I can.”

His most perplexing work may be
Labor Day Comic
, a series of screenshots of mundane tasks that he performed on his computer over the course of one Labor Day. He strung these images, one after another, onto a blog, and called it a comic strip. Frame by frame, we watch him download a Vangelis album from MediaFire—taking screen caps every step of the way—then uploading these images to Flickr, and finally posting the whole process to Blogger. The title suggests a political edge: is this what labor looks like now?

The Greek artist Ilan Manouach takes a more directly political stance in his work. He's most famous for his book
Katz
, which is a reinterpretation of Art Spiegelman's
Maus
except that all the characters—Nazis, Jews, Poles—are drawn with cats' heads. (In the original, Jews are drawn as mice, while non-Jewish Germans and Poles are drawn as cats and pigs, respectively.) Besides this, not a single word or image was added or removed. The book caught the legal ire of Spiegelman's French publisher, Flammarion, and the entire run of one thousand copies was pulped. He did something similar with
Les Schtroumpfs noirs
(
The Black Smurfs
), a comic originally published in 1963. In the story, a Smurf village is infected by a black fly that bites all the villagers, turning them from their natural blue color to black, and making them go mad. A cure is finally found and every Smurf is restored to blue. When the book was later turned into an animation, the Smurfs were changed from black to purple to
avoid the racial subtexts. Manouach made a facsimile of the original, but transposed each of the book's four colors onto the cyan plate, resulting in a book that is entirely blue.

For his most recent project,
Tintin Akei Kongo
, Manouach took the most popular Tintin adventure in Francophone Africa,
Tintin au Congo
(1931), and had it translated for the first time into Lingala, the official Congolese dialect, without the permission of the publisher. The pirated book will never officially be distributed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—only one hundred copies have been brought to Kinshasa so far—but for Manouach: “It's the idea, the provocation, the critique, that is important.” Manouach sees himself as an agitator, a sort of Hans Haacke of the comics world. Trained as a conventional comic book artist, he grew restless by what he perceived to be the limits of the comics world. “There's not much critical discourse in comics and not much questioning of convention,” he says. “Instead, there's a lot of nostalgia, which has kept comics politically and aesthetically conservative.”

“Certainly there are many issues connected to fair use that are still in flux, and these artists are all troubling those waters in interesting ways,” says Kartalopoulos. “Comics have historically been considered part of commercial popular culture, and existed to the side of modernist developments for much of the twentieth century. What's most exciting to me is that now there is a growing critical mass of well-rounded comics artists who are comfortably bringing their avant-garde legacy to the form.” There is also, these days,
a renewed sense of the political power of cartooning, in the wake of the attack on
Charlie Hebdo
and the debates that have followed. These artists' strategies—Sikoryak's remixings, Manouach's recontextualizations, Larmee's provocations—bring a contemporary set of conceptual tools to the making of comics, tools that could prove helpful in navigating the swift-moving waters of the Internet age.

The Internet is indeed changing our ways of reading and writing. Few want to read
War and Peace
sitting in front of a computer screen; it's the wrong place for in-depth, lengthy reading, which is better done offline, either on paper or on our devices. When we are in front of a computer hitched to a fast web connection, the last thing we want to do is stop, slow down, and do only one thing. Idling on a highway is antithetical to the medium. Instead, our time in front of a machine is active time: we're clicking and seeking, harvesting and communicating. Our ways of reading and writing, then, while on the web, reflect this active state. Offering coping strategies, any number of articles tell us to keep our e-mails short, that lengthy e-mails will most likely go unread. They offer suggestions like “commit to making every message five sentences long—or less” and “treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response.” The migration to short forms of writing and reading that we're witnessing—shorter e-mails, tweets,
SMS messages—are the latest in a long line of compressed language: hieroglyphs, ideograms, haiku, Morse code, telegrams, newspaper headlines, the old Times Square news zipper, advertising slogans, concrete poems, and desktop icons.

Writing on electronic platforms is transforming aspects of our daily communication into constraint-based writing, a method of writing according to preordained rules initially explored in the 1960s and '70s by a group of French writers who called themselves the Oulipo (
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle
/ Workshop of Potential Literature). They devised formulas for writing that were more akin to mathematics than they were to literature. A famous Oulipian constraint is called n+7, which involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary, so that the Declaration of Independence run through an n+7 operation, as the poet Rosmarie Waldrop did in her poem “Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence” begins: “We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims.” The writer, bound by the constraints, accepts the results, regardless of how unappealing they may be to one's own literary sensibilities. Perhaps the most well known work of Oulipo writing is Georges Perec's
La disparition,
a 300-page novel that never uses the letter
e
. (The English translation of the book,
A Void
, which also doesn't contain the letter
e
, is an equally stunning feat.) Other methods used by the group include anagrams, palindromes, and Fibonacci sequences.