Interlude: “O Sapientia”

Antiphon:
O sapientia
O oriens

Dairy cows do tarry
at night, when the windows
shudder. They sleep and they dream
of longsuffering fields and of the
old barn abbots.

Prokeimenon:
Until the Lord disperses us,
and the land is hard and empty.

My uncle walks funny,
and sometimes he stumbles
on his own feet. As he falls he
cries out to the Lord and –
oh the Lord he moves.

The old drawn curtains bleed
light. They don’t hide the
holy seat or the rod. We see,
and we shake, and the old
Pole quivers.

Sanctus:
The television screen flickers
three times, in quick succession.
The newsman stutters.

The taxicab grinds to a halt
and out she steps. She’s rough
in tongue. It’s Vegas, she says.
It’ll do that to you.
She takes her breadbag and drops it.

The door swings decidely shut,
and stays furiously closed. Inside,
there’s a table and chair,
and an old pack of cigarettes.
It’s a fire to smoke up the whole room.

Epiklesis:
The water rushes over the curb
and down into the storm drain.
Holy things are for the holy.

Heavy eyes on the old Muslim
in the deli on the street.
He shuts down the store for
a few minutes as he heads
to the back to pray.

Squirrels are never comfortable.
Paranoia drives every moment
and they shake with fear at
the slightest brush against the
tree. Their’s the constant vigil.

Mysterium:
The welders weld,
and melt the metal.
It’s almost quitting time.

The land is moved, and the
priest makes a short prayer.
Here comes the chariot; it is
time to prepare the wine.
Now is the day and the time.

Metacomics

I’m a big fan of anything involving the prefix “meta.” Metahumor, metashows, metanarratives, really, anything self-referential, compositions aware of themselves. It’s why I’ve always enjoyed She-Hulk; she inhabits a strange corner of the Marvel Universe where she can see her own page layouts (going so far in one issue as to use them to cover her nakedness while she changed), interact with her editors, artists, and writers, and reference specific comics in court in her work as a lawyer. She became famous for this awareness, routinely lampooning the conventions of the books and cheekily mocking her own writers with abandon, alongside Deadpool and Howard the Duck.

Grant Morrison took a similar course with his work on Animal Man for DC, albeit more seriously. Morrison inserted himself into his own comics, as a mysterious, all-knowing character called The Writer, and gave lengthy exposition on the craft of comic-book writing and its problems and strengths, including the tendency to resurrect the dead, which he personally does for Animal-Man in issue 26.

Then there’s, of course, Maus, a comic book about the writing of a comic book, sort of the Adapation of the comics world. The first really serious comic I ever read — I was eleven — it’s the dual story of Vladek Spiegelman’s life in Nazi Poland and at Auschwitz, and his son Art’s attempt, thirty years later, to chronicle those events in a graphic novel. It recounts, for example, both Art’s interviewing his father and his listening to recordings of those interviews, and discussing with his wife what animal to portray her as, due to her French heritage, even while she’s already a mouse in the book. An entire aside surreally deals with his own struggles regarding the appropriateness of even trying to tell this story and how to deal with the reality of the Holocause, and is portrayed there as a human wearing a mouse mask.

All of which brings me to the strip I’m showcasing here. It’s called 1/0 (“one over zero”), a bizarre comic strip whose only premise was itself. Beginning as a simple experiment in drawing a comic absolutely every day, it quickly grew out of control. It opens with blackness, nothingness, until author and artist Tailsteak slowly begins bringing his world into existence. Reasoning he can’t have a strip without a character, he swipes a one-off guy from another strip. Needing someone for him to interact with, he takes a rib, and poof! Ribby is born. All the characters derive from other characters in a similar fashion, moving down in scale, including Manny the Molecule.

All of the characters break the fourth wall, except for one, who believes the rest of the cast is deluded for believing in Tailsteak, and invents crackpot explanations for everything in their world. The cast grows disillusioned with Tailsteak’s authority, and goes on strike against him, resulting in a weak of standing around doing nothing. If ever there was a story where the characters took on a life of their own, it’s this one.

1/0 ran for three years, or a thousand strips, each one of which is worth your time and consideration. It delved into theism and the nature of writing. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a comic as intelligent as this one.