FOUND GRAPHIC NOVEL, OR COMIC

We had the gutters replaced recently - not your ordinary gutters, either: square-sided zinc-lined channels like small canals, running all the way round the house, out of sight behind the tops of the walls - and while the young man was up there on the roof, or, just as perilously, while he was exploring the dark mysteries of the long-neglected, floorboard-rotten upper floor of the barn, he found a French comic book from 1978. In a strikingly postmodern mix of genres, its story has cowboys and alien monsters:

DAN DARE POSTMODERNISM

Following the blogpost Quaintess of the Recent Past No. 27, which referred to the Dan Dare modernism of the pods on the London Eye (and their design similarity to Paris buses of 45 years previously) I've had my attention drawn to a contemporary, and therefore inevitably knowing, version of the comic in which Dan Dare appeared (which was the Eagle,  printed on glossy colour paper and therefore far more expensive than those down to earth, much loved alternatives, the Beano  and Dandy).

Today's version is Spaceship Away and thanks to Roy Kelly I can reproduce the most Dylan-infested page of their story Gates of Eden, which features the brilliantly named John Wesley Hibbings (drawn by Tim Booth):

 

There is another, still more vivid drawing of the Vincent Price Era Bob Dylan in another contemporary comic (or graphic novel, in this case, if you prefer), The Umbrella Academy, created by Gerard Way, the singer in My Chemical Romance. Here He appears as God, though He is unnamed:

That central frame: perfect.

GEORGE COCHRANE: LONG TIME COMING...

 Long Time Gone is an ongoing Graphic Novel, conceived, designed and being written by the Brooklyn NY based artist George Cochrane. It tells an autobiographical tale in 24 chapters, but spanning just one day and night, with each 24 page chapter depicting one hour's events and atmosphere. Modelled on Homer's Odyssey (told in 24 chapters) and James Joyce's Ulysses (the Odyssey compressed into one day), the chapters are emerging separately and in sequence. Cochrane works with his young daughter Fiamma on the novel (she was 6 years old when he started and is now 10), incorporating ideas, drawings and writing of hers. In fine postmodernist tradition the result will be a creative work partly about the creative process itself.

The title is taken from the Bob Dylan song ‘Long Time Gone', which, when the project began, was still a relatively obscure old recording and still unreleased. This confesses Cochrane's interest in inserting into his narrative Dylan songs not commonly known outside of collector circles - including ‘Bring It On Home' and ‘Sign On The Cross' from the Basement Tapes, ‘Lonesome River Edge' from the Banjo Tape and so on. These lyrics are woven into the story along with references to the history of Western Fine Art, comics, jazz (especially Lester Young and Charlie Parker) and what Cochrane calls “certain works of canonical literature".

Some of Long Time Gone's pages have also been exhibited: at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA and at the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, MN.

The first four chapters have been published, have sold out and are now being reprinted. They are, respectively, ‘Bird Gets the Worm', ‘A Nick of Time', ‘In A Mist' and ‘Calypso Tap Number'. There are also two wanderings-off from this main structure so far: smaller print-run and different-shaped volumes numbered 3a and 4.4. Cochrane is working on the latter and on the main Chapter 5. His website is here.

MAKING AN ANIMATED FILM OF A COMIC BOOK ABOUT PHO

I know nothing about graphic novels / comic books  -  in my childhood comics were either the Beano (good) or war comics (boring), and then when the Fabulous Furry Freaks generation came along, I was turned off, despite the palpable mad genius of Robert Crumb, by how sordid a representation they were giving to what I experienced as the glorious 2nd half of the 1960s. But I just stumbled upon this, loved the hand-drawn style of the SubmarineChannel page where I found it, and was both painfully envious of the joy of collaborative creative work  -  my own work always seems lone and less creative  -  and entranced by the whole process. (This isn't important but there's even a little bit of a mid-60s Dylan song in here, from around 08.12 to 08.35.) Watch to the end and it'll make you feel hungry too...


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