THIS REVIEW ORIGINALLY RAN ON COMICS BULLETIN
Elkin:
Using only a dessert spoon and a Swiss Army Knife, guided only by
your Unforgiving Eye®
flashlight and your authentic replica British Army compass, sometimes
you dig and you dig and you dig a tunnel from one place, perhaps a
Toxic Wasteland, to another place, perhaps a graveyard in Nullepart,
CA, and, through that process, you travel from one sense of the
possibilities of a particular matter, only to find that as you burst
from the ground in an act of parturition you have entered a world so
wholly outside your ken that the only practical outcome is to
literally lose your head.
David Hine and
Shaky Kane warn us this will happen in the very first pages of The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred
#1. They want to prepare you for the journey they are going to take
you on in this six issue series. They know that you are naked, nearly
hairless, and you've been digging for a long time.
It is a warning
that comes from a place of love.
Reading The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred was
a journey from one type of understanding of process to something else
– something fluid, something fecund, something thick. This series
took me as a reader and a lover of comic books outside of my usual
critical sensibility and swaddled me tight in something else.
There was a
growth process that reading this series forced me to embrace. I had
to become a different type of reader to appreciate what Hine and Kane
wanted me to disinter from this work. I had to formulate new
questions. I had to find answers in places I wouldn't have thought to
look. I had to create meaning from disparate clues seemingly floating
in the effluvium.
And this process
of apprehending process and purpose has, in a way, left me a stronger
reader and a greater appreciator of possibilities of comics.
In the spirit of
this, Silva, I'm going to quote you back to yourself. In February of
this year, you wrote a review of the trade paperback release of the
original The
Bulletproof Coffin
series. At the end of that piece you said the following:
About his novel,Ulysses, James Joyce wrote: “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.” You realize that Kane and Hine are bricoleurs and that they’ve indulged their inner Joyce and filled The Bulletproof Coffin with homages and clues that infest the story without wanking on wistfulness. Hine and Kane have projected a world of their own making, one that you remember and cherish – a world where comic books become immortal works of art.
I agree with your assessment of the first
series. I wax as poetic as you as to what can be said after my
initial reading. But what you said here puts quotation marks around
my earlier words because it raises the question can The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred
be discussed as a solo piece of work or is it just an opportunity to
begin to unwrap some of the homages and clues from the first series?
Or is this patently the wrong question to be asking right now, and,
by asking it am I focused more on the destination than the journey?
Silva:
Quote me, Elkin! Not before I quote me. The word I would use is
'immersive.' Like its predecessor, The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred
immerses the reader in a construct, a milieu -- as I
said -- a projected world. Maybe
that's what had your sensibilities at sixes and sevens. Bulletproof
Coffin: Disinterred slumps at the
shoreline, at the breakers, between 'a' reality and something else;
it's uncanny. Destination? Journey? Dunno. In country like this best
thing to do is go native, let it wash over you. Immerse, Elkin,
immerse.
Your choice to begin at the beginning is
inspired. Have you ever felt as our naked tunneling friend does in
those first few pages of issue #1? Have you ever picked up a dessert
spoon, Swiss Army knife, authentic replica British Army Compass and
Unforgiving Eye®
Flashlight and tried to tunnel your way out? Sorry, Bulletproof
Coffin: Disinterred always puts me
in an interrogative
mood. I'm reminded of a
line from Michael Chabon's The
Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,
''Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for
what you are escaping to'' (21).
Leave it to a writer like Hine to concede the
past and then piss on that concession: ''Don't
think I need to shore up that last section, never going to use it
again. This is a one way trip.''
It's not so much that Hine is taking the piss (taking liberties) as
much as he's moving on, tunneling out and the devil take the
hindmost. It's all the damn subversiveness of the thing that makes it
so anxiety inducing -- Hine and Kane are perennial expectation
deflectors, subversives of subversions. So, where does it all lead?
When that dessert spoon digs into the void, one
would expect to see a familiar face follow its progress, a character
from ''that last section,''
but it doesn't and yet it does. Presume to exhume. The Unforgiving
Eye, spade in hand, perches at the grave's mouth undoing work already
been done. Our naked mole friend says: ''Looks
like I'm not the only one digging the graveyard scene. This is the
place all right.'' As a reader (and
Bulletproof Coffin
aficionado) I dig this graveyard scene too, grooving on it with pick
and shovel only to get my head handed to me or, to be more specific,
disintegrated by a ''high-powered
laser weapon.'' The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred is a
series of 'just-when-you-think' moments -- it's unsettling and I
think that's the point. Hine and Kane don't want to repeat
themselves, they want only to pick at the corpse a bit. What they are
after, like that British Army Compass, is to make The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred into
an ''authentic replica.''
As Detective Sartre uncovers the facts about the Full Moon murders,
he comes to the conclusion that the trick is to spot the fake, the
dodge, the gull … the facsimile. The question is: what to do once
that information is at hand?
Since you brought up 'enigmas and puzzles,' a
nod and a wink goes to the name on the cigar box that Sartre keeps
hidden in his desk drawer: ''J King K
Cigars.'' The authentic hidden
within the print. It's an ineffable and blink-and-you-miss-it moment
like this that makes Hine and Kane's work delight and frustrate at
the same time. At some point doesn't the reader want to know what's
real, what's the truth, what's behind the pasteboard mask? Maybe this
is the tight swaddle, that 'something else' you experienced when you
began to read the series … that there is no truth, only subversions
of subversions and that kind of thing is as unsettling as it is
uncanny.
Put another way, maybe The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred
posits another reality, another projection, a world of 'what could
be,' a place where you and your red-haired, buxom bullet-chested
partner in crime-fighting become lovers and crush communists. A world
that breaks out of capes and cowls and shines a shield of justice
onto what comic books can be because that is what they once were;
acts of extreme creation, boundless, not tied to story arcs or
continuity; one-shots, standalones of otherness. Exhume the corpse of
comic book's past, carry the fire and progress, progress, progress.
But let's not be too serious because that will only get you shot in
the face. Elkin?
Elkin:
Sometimes, Silva, a shot in the face is exactly what we need. It is
so easy to become complacent, to become lazy in our thinking, to
define and label and box and construct a
priori while ignoring what is
actually in our hand – especially with art where sometimes what has
been created is so outside our experience that we must indolently
rely heavily on our intellectual past to make sense of the present or
else go mad in the face of incomprehensibility.
In The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred we
do seem to be dealing with a version of “subversions of
subversions” as you so wisely pointed out. Hine and Kane have
something new to posit. They hate you for taking it easy. They demand
that you work, and from that work they expect you to grow. Easy is
static; creation is dynamic.
It is only in this, perhaps, at least for Hine
and Kane, that we can leap intellectually anew.
Take, for example, the Tuesday night story
telling at The Jumping Jive Joint in The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #2
as a springboard. Here the theme is “Love
and Mutilation” and “though
the stories may be kooky, every one is as honest as Abe Lincoln …
solid gospel.” Here we come
together to witness a sharing of tales, set to swing, where each
story combines sexuality and mutilation, each governed by a
multifaceted jewel fashioned from an asteroid, each told on the night
of a lunar flare (“signs and
portents, pal”), all pointing to
the act of creating.
But for Hine and Kane, the act of creating only
comes from an act of destruction, covered in blood, something lost
for something gained – the act of moving from one conception to
something new is violent at its heart, horrific in its telling. Life
and death, renewal, process, art. Hine sets the framework, Kane
completes the moment, it is for the reader to then disinter.
It requires work. It requires effort. It
requires action.
Why must they do this to us, Silva? Aren't we
so easily content to lay in our Bulletproof Coffin, undisturbed by
the things that make us uncomfortable, blissful in our constructs of
how the world spins, keen and strong with our smug belly rubbing and
deft beard stroking? Why must these artists assault us so?
Silva: Ah,
Elkin, ''the strange appetites lust
engenders.'' Comic books are
the outsider experience. Here is a knife of the finest Sheffield
steel, let us swear a blood oath not to forget that before the
accountants choked the multiplexes with amazing and avenging
computer-generated gee-gaws, these same heroes were gestated in the
minds of madcap artistic savants and shit-slingers backed by
pornographers, bootleggers and every stripe of hustler. Hine and Kane
show us the comic book's seedy and obscene past -- a
quasi-hop-head-beat-Christmas Carol
set to a soundtrack of atonal jazz. It does a body good to venture
beyond the priori walls, get Gotham behind thee, put Metropolis in
the rear-view, and turn your back on the 616, no?
Let us talk process. Creation from destruction,
huh? I dig daddy-o, but I'm looking at the flipside of that record. I
see with my unforgiving eye a determined dissection in all of this
here destruction. Hine and Kane are anatomists, amalgamators and
aggregators of the highest order, bricoleurs
of cool to borrow a phrase. You do not
suggest, nor do I think they are like poor Uncle Gaston with hands
(or feet) of clay. Hine and Kane act the hack, deign as duffers, but
it's a put-on, another feint to put you off the scent, a shot of
Visine to the eyes, breath mints and Binaca. Creators, yes, most
definitely yes, and artists too, no doubt, but Hine and Kane are
'makers'
as well; DIY Dr. Frankensteins on a 'mission from God' to repurpose
what is already (nearly) gone or forgotten, eldritch lore, say, from
more Entertaining Comics. The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #2
is a twilight lit place on the outer limits of the mainstream,
familiar-enough and so hyper-aware as to shake something out of the
reader. But what?
You write of 'work,' 'effort' and 'action.' I
read 'mania,' 'brio' and 'inspiration.' When you offered me an
invitation to write about this series I accepted because I wanted to
see where we would go; you're right, Hine and Kane can only take us
so far, we have to (we are, we must) do the work. The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred
makes me want to write, makes me want to (re)create and infest others
with my verve for this work. Hine and Kane inspire me to action. Few
entertainments can say as much. Isn't that why we sit here anchored
to our laptops, banging away, creating critical worlds, only to smash
them flat and start over again? To get out what we mean
to say, to charge Elkin to make
Silva a better writer, and vice versa? It's like Pete Townsend says,
never spend your guitar
or your pen.
You write: ''Hine sets the framework, Kane
completes the moment.'' Let's set the framer beside (beHine?) for a
moment. Talk to me of Kane. Is his art purposefully retro or stylized
to the point of distraction? The primary colors especially the pea
green of Uncle Gaston's attic or the deep nighttime blues of
apartments and bedrooms that he uses in issue #2 are bang on. Like
the series itself, there is no middle ground when it comes to Kane's
art. Love it or hate it, it's a singularity in cities of simulacra.
Inspire me, Elkin. Make me work.
Elkin: Aw,
shit-rickies, Silva – I thought you were making me work. And you
are. But not as hard as Kane and Hine do. And they do (be-do-be-do).
I knew you were going to get into this whole
art business. You would be hard pressed to talk about The
Bulletproof Coffin without talking
about the art. It's like talking about an orange without talking
about the peel (“A man is not a piece of fruit!” – Willy
Loman). Would this series be what it is if it were not for the odd
squiggly hand of Shaky Kane? Would this comic be something else were
it not for his color palette?
I don't even want to consider answering these
questions for fear of plunging myself into another dimension, and god
knows I'm having enough issues dealing with this one.
So let's talk about what we got, the art of
Shaky Kane.
Kane's art comes into the forefront in issues 4
and 5 of this series, because in these issues what has been passing
as a narrative breaks down even further. Issue 4 is the famous “84”
issue, “a new non-linear narrative
that has slipped across the borders from some parallel existence.”
Here's a comic book purportedly part of a larger series (it's issue 4
of 6 – it says so on the cover), an integral part of a larger
story, that now follows its own beat, taking cues from Brion Gysin
and William Burroughs – randomly arranged to ''transcend
its prosaic starting point.'' Balls.
Issue 5 of The Bulletproof Coffin:
Disinterred is told using a
''recreation of art from the original
set of 'Hateful Dead' bubblegum cards.''
What we have in this issue, the penultimate issue of the series I
might add, are 25 splash pages with 4-6 sentences running underneath.
Double balls.
As traditional narrative structure is inverted
in these issues, the reader has to work even harder to build up his
or her sense making self. So he or she, flailing wildly in this
chaotic juice, clings desperately to the images. But what images are
there to moor this poor floundering vessel buffeted so heavily by
this juice? Kane's images are there. A parade of grotesques – a
paean of violence – a litany of the bizarre – all of it thrust
into your eyes like a well-sharpened stick as it leaps from
backgrounds of solid yellows and reds and blacks and blues.
There is nothing subtle in presentation. But
its luridness masks an enormity of intent. Each image is filled with
enough choices to fill a department store (the kind that... you
know... sells choices.....). Given the time, enough caffeine, and
little to no care for personal hygiene, I could probably write 5,000
words on the first four panels on page one of issue 4 alone.
Say what you will about Kane's style or palette
or choices – the dude's got chops and patience and smarts. For me,
he is the perfect artist for what they are trying to do here.
Remember, Silva, when you called them “perennial expectation
deflectors, subversives of subversions”? Well, Kane's art? That's
what that looks like.
Silva: I
ask. You answer. So, allow me to riposte. Yes. Wicked. Wanton.
Vulgar. And that's only the preview image for the next (and final)
issue, ''Kiss the Clown.'' Crazy
Clown Time, indeed. Ye
gods! Kane is like (and better than) a poke in the eye with a sharp
stick or a sharpened bamboo pole for that matter. Again, I come back
to the word 'singular.' Similar, I suppose, to Tom
Scioli (the two, I would
hazard, have forgotten more about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko than
I'll ever know), although Kane's work is less reverent, more primal,
perhaps, more of a distillation of 'the old masters.' You're right;
of course, it's those undressed backgrounds that make the images pop
like the sound a socket makes as its prize is rent by the Harvester
of Eyes, itself.
The episodes of the 'Hateful Dead' in The
Bulletproof Coffin were my least
favorite. Like 'Burn Unit,' I'm fried
when it comes to zombies. In a story that was so inventive and so
eccentric, the 'Hateful Dead' came off as pedestrian, a narrative
dead-end. To my surprise, The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred
fleshed-out (groan) these
Charlie-finding-Charlie-killing-Charlie-eating automatons and made
them, somehow, more human than human. In part, I have you, Elkin, to
thank for resurrection of my interest in said dead. Your enthusiasm
for BC:D
#5 got me to check it out, give it a second-chance, a second-life so
to speak. Hine and Kane's work here is
often so peculiar and so radical and
they are such lords of misrule that nothing is ever scared -- not
even their own work. I'm willing to bet
that each would make much sport of the phrase, 'protect the brand.'
Again, subversives of subversion.
You mention Burroughs and Gysin and the
fractured quality of issues 4 and 5. There is definitely and 'arts
and crafts' characteristic to each of these issues, especially #4,
the (so-called) cut-up issue. It hit me, like a smack upside my dome,
that for all the narrative fuckery and
splintering going on, this is a series of origin issues, the title of
which, 'Before
Bulletproof Coffin'
could be applied and would be apt. I'm a
recovering comic book origin addict and although one too many
superhero summer blockbusters did cure me of my
dependence, I know I could backslide at any moment. An origin is
supposed to tie up loose ends, to disinter what was hidden, but it's
a 'terminal' progression in'it? I mean, once the curtain pulls back,
reveals Vader's your father (Spoiler!) or that your real parents are
dead alien scientists there's little ground left to tread -- unless
one wants to 'reimagine,' in which case those
iterations are innumerable, but I digress. Or one can get so 'lost'
in one's own mythos that one's own head permanently adheres to one's
own ass, an inverse and a 'questioning' ouroboros. Hine and Kane dig
up the dirt on the denizens of The
Bulletproof Coffin, but they take
(and give) what they need and they move on. Let the (hateful) dead
bury the dead.
One last backwards glance before I move on.
Hine and Kane are not penetrating any virgin flesh here with either
the layout or the look of The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #5.
Again, they repurpose, they reorder a previous pre-code
idea to fit their own
design. For me, it's a skeletal tap on
the shoulder, a reminder of the matchless potential that rests within
the form of sequential art; if only it gets wrest out by the Hines
and Kanes of the world; and, only, if we, the consumers, call forth
these horrors from beyond the stars. Or, perhaps, it is for the best
that the 'Hateful Dead' remain on the other side within their ruined
'city that is all too familiar.'
Perhaps …
But “perhaps”, is, perhaps, the word that
best describes what this whole thing is all about. Perhaps. What Kane
and Hine are doing throughout this series is a series of perhaps(es).
You mention origins – perhaps this is the intent. I struggle to
create meaning – perhaps this is the intent. Together we reach for
words to describe the indecipherable – perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Then again, perhaps, it all boils down to a
sense of play.
Perhaps issue #3 of The
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred is
actually what is the Vinz Clortho to our Zuul. Is this all just the
rich imaginative play world of a pudgy bowl-haired young boy with
both sex and family issues that, perhaps, through the influence of
the mystical powers of a magic meteorite, somehow seeps into “a”
reality and absorbs even the creators in its game?
Perhaps...
But damnit – there I go trying to make sense
of this whole thing based on comfortable tropes bred from reading
too many Bronze Age Comics while selfishly bingeing on Cocoa and
Ho-Hos in my suburban Dallas ranch home. Once again I find myself
relying on my sensibilities in order to disinter.
I'm floundering here, Silva. I left my chops at
the butcher shop. Lead me, guide me, help me.
Silva:
You're not floundering at all. For
better (or worse?) you're in it … that disorienting feeling you're
feeling, I think, that's one of the pleasures and pains of reading
this series. A bit of mystery and ambiguity cleanses even as it
confounds. Remember, immerse. BC:D
is a tough not to crack, not to mention a real ball buster. It
doesn't fit into any category (which is what I like about it so
much). It's a disruptive little fucker that slips away from you once
you think you've set the most tentative of hands upon it. Maybe you
(we) are looking for connections that aren't there, but only appear
to be. That 'meteor shit' -- to quote Stephen King's Creepshow
alter ego, Jordy Verrill -- allows for some kind of connective
tissue, but I think it's the reddest of red herrings. One other thing
that I'm feeling here and maybe you are too, is that because these
are standalone issues they literally, figuratively, and every other
kind of 'ly' word stand apart from one another and from everything
else; they're goofy, they're serious, they're gross, they're funny
all at the same time. How many comic books at least try
to hold such disparate strands together? BC:D
falls apart, comes together and then falls-apart again and again and
again, it's tiresome, yes, but there's something going on in all that
cacophony, all that noise. What I don't know which is why I think
you're so close. Maybe and this is the scaredy-cat's calling card,
the lazy man's straw man: it's not supposed to make sense. Why should
it? I like order as much as the next dudes, but messiness, like it or
not, makes life worth living ... somebody's got to straighten crooked
pictures in hotel rooms, after all. Here's hoping the final nail in
(out?) The Bulletproof Coffin:
Disinterred provides some
perspective and maybe even some closure. Yeah, sure.
BULLETPROOF COFFIN: DISINTERRED SERIES REVIEW,
THE SCREENPLAY
FADE IN:
INT. FUNERAL PARLOR VIEWING ROOM
An open coffin is placed at the far end
of the room. Perpendicular to the coffin, but at an angle is an easel
holding a poster of the cover image to The Bulletproof Coffin:
Disinterred #6. Two men are arranging straight-backed faux
leather covered banquet chairs for a viewing.
ELKIN, shaved head, goatee, and
glasses, wears a brown corduroy jacket, with an ornate rooster pin in
the lapel. He looks like a high-school English teacher. He is
easy-going, but slightly on edge.
SILVA, six-feet tall and gawky, long
arms and legs. He wears black Nike sneakers with a red swoosh, blue
jeans and a blue short-sleeve shirt with the words: 'I Drink Your
Milkshake' written in old English script across the front. He is
fastidious in his work, making adjustments, checking and
double-checking to make sure the chairs are arranged in a way only he
seems to know or notice.
SILVA (looking at the
poster)
So, that cover …
I'm going to have nightmares for months. I'd rather
talk about what
Amelia finds in the Kiss's basement. And I DON'T want to talk at all
about what she finds down there. In the basement. Trap doors. Locked
rooms. I've never liked clowns. Coulrophobia, it's
called, you know, fear of clowns. Leave it to Kane to fuck with my
head.
ELKIN (wearily)
This whole series
fucks with my head. I don’t know how to make sense of it. To parse
it.
Where’s the hook?
Who am I supposed to be following? I can handle unconventional.
I can do oddball, but
this is something else.
SILVA
I know. It's great! Not one issue, not a one (or a five) prepares you
for what comes next.
I'm all for
randomness, but I'm glad to let the Bulletproof Coffin mellow a bit.
One minute, a murder conspiracy (maybe) the next a jazz club, cards
and cut-ups. I thought I had seen everything and then, issue #6. Who
thinks this kind of shit up? Really? Black rain, a guy with his mouth
sewn shut who speaks through dolls? That basement. Kane and Hine
outdid themselves on this one. Man! Those cats can wail.
ELKIN (demanding)
What’s
so wrong with order? Telling a story. Why all the obfuscation? I can
dig it, but it makes for a bugger of thing to try to write about. I
think I need more than this non-repeating post-post-modern,
interpretation all the way done randomness.
Two young girls (ages three and eight)
run into the room and between the rows of chairs chasing after one
another. SILVA looks up momentarily distracted as they run out of the
room again. He turns back to ELKIN, goes back to work.
SILVA (mumbling)
Keeping the world strange … all I'm saying.
ELKIN (agitated)
Planetary! Planetary! Don't you blaspheme in here!
You’re not pullin' no
Planetary on
me are you, Silva? I was reading Planetary while you were
hanging out in your fancy east-coast ivory tower graduate school
classes, navel-gazing, staring into the middle-distance thinking, who
would win a punch-up, the deconstructionists or the new critics!
VOICE
Hey, what's all this noise?
SACKS enters. He is a kind-looking
gentleman, distinguished, early fifties, avuncular. He is ELKIN and
SILVA's boss. Behind Sacks, stands a much younger man tapping away at
a smartphone he holds in both hands. This is DJELJOSEVIC, he does not
talk. He is the personification of detached early-twenties cool.
SACKS
Are you two almost finished? You know,
you’ve got other work to do. (PAUSE) Carry on gentleman.
SACKS and DJELJOSEVIC leave. ELKIN
holding a chair under each arm as SILVA, straightens a chair, moving
it micrometers with his fingertips. ELKIN sets the chairs down.
SILVA
(not looking at Elkin,
focused on a row of chairs)
All I'm saying is
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred is the anti-anodyne, full of
switchback loops, bright colors and a warren of rabbit holes. It's
what you bring to it, it's like you said, you gotta' work for it,
it's work-for-hire escapism. We could probably talk for hours about
dreams, the dream-life of the Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred.
It seems a cheat to think, 'it was all a dream,' but what if it was,
a story, a fiction, something made-up?
I'm clowning you
Elkin, but there sure are a lot of dreams, a lot of dreamers. Can you
anchor your reality, your understanding in a dream, would you want
to? Hine and Kane give you a way out. Deacon's way. Did Deacon find a
way out or did Deacon find a way in? I'm struck by the pathos in the
end, for Nancy, for Clarissa, for Amelia. The subversions are all
around in this last issue, the rug is barely under your feet before
Hine and Kane are yanking it out from under us again, and again and
again.
ELKIN goes to one end of one of the
rows and pulls a hidden laptop from beneath one of the chairs. SILVA
sits down on the opposite side of the room. Everything is silence.
SILVA, now has produced his own laptop. He begins to type …
END
Keith Silva is a recent relapsed reader of comic books, loves alliteration, and dies a little inside each time he can’t use an oxford comma in his reviews for Comics Bulletin. He spends most days waiting for files to render except on occasion when he can slip the bonds of editing and amble around cow barns, run alongside tractors and try not to talk while the camera is running. When not playing the fool for the three women he lives with, he reads long, inscrutable novels with swear words. He recently took single malt Scotch and would like to again, soon.
Follow Keith on Twitter at @keithpmsilva or (for the more adventurous soul) read his blog,Interested in Sophisticated Fun?
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