Comics Sans
By:
October 18, 2011
Here at HILOBROW we love comics. But every hilobrow loves comics in his or her own way.
My introduction to comics came at the requisite early age. We (my brothers and I) didn’t buy comics at the drugstore. I am not sure why; we were not wealthy, but neither were comics expensive. At any rate, we didn’t buy them. But we did acquire them. Dad prowled the flea markets in pursuit of his various collections: postcards, bottles, particulate material ephemera from decades past. He would also get us comics, bringing home a stack bought en masse from one of the vendors. These comics were never new; they were always old issues from someone else’s room, someone else’s childhood and, crucially for me, they were often issue 1 of 2, or issue 2 of 3, of multi-volume narratives.
We loved them. They were comics! But only partial ones. I would struggle to imagine what happened next, for the first halves, or what could have possibly preceded them, for the later ones. There was no possibility of obtaining the companion issues for the complete stories; our library didn’t carry comics, at least not back then, and interwebs full of scanned imagery were only an inked dot in someone’s mind’s eye.
Eventually, I learned to stop worrying and love the fragment. I didn’t try to complete the story, which would only be me making it up and thus would not be real. I became more comfortable with incompleteness, and with a pervasive ambiguity, concerning both narrative and also what the physical world might have on offer.
If this seems like arm-wrestling a bug into a feature, well so it was. But at a certain point you work with the gap. You don’t look down; you flap.
It would probably be too much to attribute my later love of fragmented narrative back to these early ephemera. Comics, after all, are just a tiny, flat piece of growing up, eventually forgotten in an attic, or offered along to other kids, through other flea markets. But consistency has arisen from sources even more foolish than these.
[Collage by Mark Todd, via bigredrobot]