Comical Interlude

Paper represented something far more than a mere sheet of paper suggested in the game by the flat hand facing down. It was ass the publications and records of human thinking. “Paper” is a metaphor for all the good and bad decisions we had ever made. It stood for all the meetings and meditations of our entire history. And in the game, paper triumphs over rock but it is weaker than scissors. - Willem Boshoff I read once that paper making began for religious purposes, imbuing paper with elements of the sacred. When human beings began to truly distinguish themselves from other mammals, the recording of their collective intelligence could arguably be the pinnacle technology they devised for the conquest to the status of ‘superior species’. With this said, I claim to be a Art Critic nor philosopher on the evolution of the human super-ego, but I love words. Better yet, words found a better companion in paper. Not durable a form of recording when compared to its predecessor and perhaps adversary – rock. From rock-art, stone tablets to scrolls; images have been an ingredient component of the overall validity of the worth of paper. Text eventually gained dominance, I suppose; but images, more especially sketched images still prevailed as the ‘true cuts’ into the sanctity of “paper”. Now comics are a confrontation with paper that I feel brings the metaphor of paper as a form of memory (memory being a violent activity against forgetting) to the fore, more so when memory is said to be gravely dependent on images even in infants. And comic books made their way into my youth of slogging through various avenues of knowledge accumulation in the form of gifts from my father. Those were a pair of 1964 Batman Comic Books and 3 Superman 4th edition of some 1960 something just to show my naivety at that time. But they soon became my guides into the world of animation and comic books – I, a novice who only appreciated The Bafana’s from Bona Magazine back-pages. Considering how dense in narrative imagery these comic strips were, it was during the ‘new’ discovery of ‘advanced’ that I took notice of the value of images themselves as art-form. The images could tell their own story independent of the text even to my illiterate uncles. And to my surprise upon further investigation into the animated world these books confronted my mind with, I realised that images possess a ‘language’ independent of Linguistics and more precisely the written word. Not to say the words couldn’t ‘conjure up images’, perhaps precisely that word tend to attach themselves to imagery to sustain their meaning. And on paper, their magical union becomes the mystery that is... So on this day I find myself at The Goethe Institute Gallery, conducting casting sessions for film for another gallery when I come across a Comics, Manga & Co Exhibition. The synchronised coincidence is that the text on the comics being shown are in a language I don’t understand. The language being German. Yet, this event seems to take me back to my childhood thoughts about how, on paper comic images never seemed to intend to resemble or be caricature of human beings. They seemed to rather be what human being could be or caricatures of what was (emphasis on the unclear nature of memory), and unlike portraiture which aimed at resemblance of some sort of perfection of the human form in a statis. On these walls, the comics were out of bounds, plastic with a degree of elasticity which is only reserved for the mental faculty activities of image creation and interpretation. To me, the images seemed to expand limits of representation, going beyond the static manifestations that are the drawings themselves, and reclaiming their own physicality that doesn’t depend on dangerous human truths. Even though lines might denote boundaries, when told in the porous and uncertain way of a child’s hand at play, they emit a freedom that can be touched by that which is beyond paper, and even the words. And here are some of the images I captured as a tribute the artists who created the marvels that are comics.