a vingança dos reprimidos
Regressamos ao fim da história com O.F. Stapledon no solrad 16 out 2023, demasiadas pontes que não queremos já detonar. Exemplo primeiro, a sua insatisfação com "the state of comics publishing and comics criticism" dos últimos vinte anos. Ler OS POSITIVOS num qualquer rant aleatório para similitudes, ou mashup que se segue:
Part of me does miss seeing cartoonists and comics critics being divided about something and arguing about it–even if it was penny ante bullshit [...] At least people were talking when they were arguing like that. Now it’s like there’s not even any talking. We need people to talk more and disagree and argue and have some opinion about what comics should be and whether or not we’re all failing to utilize the extraordinary richness that comic books offer artists.
I think comics critics need to really take seriously what we do, and be more self-conscious and self-critical about things.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
Exemplo segundo, aquilo do $$$:
When you begin to view comics history as the subject, object, and site of class struggle, the history of comics makes a lot more sense. But that requires you to have some sort of class consciousness, which unfortunately most people making comics don’t really have. And maybe even worse, a lot of people in this industry are completely hostile to thinking in this way. Even among alternative cartoonists who position themselves as wanting to “just make art,” or who are trying to somehow exist outside of this economic context.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
Exemplo terceiro, o nosso ódio de estimação: media,
This is true of comics because it’s true of all the other culture industries too. Comics are neither remarkable nor unique in this. [...] And I know I’m really stressing mass media, because that is admittedly what I’m interested in to a certain degree, but it’s also because that’s what is available to most people and it’s what most people are reading or watching, so I do think the state of mass media is important. [...] Like in comics, the few people actually making decent stuff–even they are kind of retreating rather than advancing. They’ve become aesthetically conservative, and there’s been this big shift where filmmakers are incapable (or uninterested) in telling stories set in the present, about the present, or concerned with the kinds of social problems we’re dealing with today: insurgent fascism, climate catastrophe, that’s sorts of things.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
Segue-se mashup da entrevista:
What does the end of comics history mean, then, in this context?
It means that around 1995–give or take—the capitalists won the war. So many of us have accepted it as natural, and just the way things are. [...] Where are the ugly, messy, fucked up, angry, trying things comics? Now we have all these comics [...] but they’re the most incredibly sanitized bourgeois comics imaginable. The aesthetic range has become very, very narrow. And again, this is a product of market forces.With “the end of comics history,” I was trying to identify a period in which the aesthetic range and diversity of comic book publishing really started to narrow and flatten and stagnate. [...] This was the best way to describe the kind of widespread malaise and dissatisfaction with comics that had been building, and that I saw other people complaining about but just…continuing to accept and buy into and consume, consume, consume even as they whined about what they were consuming—as though they physically couldn’t go without this stuff that they didn’t like reading.
For me, “the end of history” is a kind of ridiculous, provocative concept, but at the same time it gets at a very real sense that since the early 90s, since capitalism won out, mass culture has just been completely hollowed out and annihilated, and this has had a debilitating trickle-down effect on the whole industry and the people making art on its margins. We’re going nowhere and we’ve been going nowhere for quite a long time now.
Contemporary American comics really feel like they could’ve been made at any time and come from any place because they come from no place or time in particular. They’ve become aesthetically detached from any sort of historical underpinning, and, as a result they’ve become–generic isn’t the right word. They’ve become worse than generic.
I get that people aren’t going to want to hear this, but all the non-superhero comics suck, too. Not just Image stuff like I was saying, but Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, all those imprints of traditional book publishers, or these “art comics” that people are telling me are better.
So you would say comics history “ended” in the 2000s, then?
I would say that it starts to emerge in the early ‘90s and by the early 2000’s the industry was just completely unable to produce anything that genuinely seemed new, fresh, or even just anything that felt contemporary. [...] It feels like people in the 2020s have just been remaking the same kind of comic for the last twenty years. We’ve had twenty years of comics production that is all pretty much indistinguishable from one another.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
Aqui nota ao F. Fukuyama que já revisitámos por diversas vezes neste nosso espaço:
Well, the concept of “the end of history”–and readers may already recognize this–it really comes from Francis Fukuyama. [...] In it, he basically says that “history” is over because capitalism has triumphed over socialism. By “history” he has a very specific meaning in mind, which comes from Hegel, and which he actually shares with Karl Marx. For Hegel, history is this play of reactive, interacting forces that move progressively toward human emancipation. History “ends” for Hegel with the resolution of these contradictory forces and the realization of human freedom. For Marx, these forces are class based, and history is immanent to this ongoing struggle between classes. So for him, history is this ongoing battle between the capitalist and socialist tendencies within societies. And the “end of history”–or really the beginning, because he says that human history only begins with the advent of communism–but for him, he really sees these class antagonisms resolving themselves in communism, and once we’re all communists, then we can start being human. Fukuyama sort of inverts Marx to explain the triumph of capitalism over socialism at the end of the Cold War, so that instead of socialism winning out over capitalism, capitalism blankets the world and we’re all capitalists bickering among ourselves on this basis–and for Fukuyama this is a good thing. [...] As a consequence of history’s end, he claims that there are no more “political” problems. By this he means that that ideological disagreement is over, because capitalism has demonstrated its supremacy and we have all accepted it as the only viable way of organizing an economy. He still believes there will be social problems, but he basically believes that they can basically only be managed rather than solved. In this sense, he was basically right. The last thirty years have seen more or less everyone in the West accept the inevitability of capitalism. [...] Of course, Fukuyama was wrong and political problems persist, but Americans really bought into this perception that they weren’t “political” or ideological disagreements at all. These things began to be seen as “cultural” or “technical,” and the solutions on offer were various forms of representation or incorporation into capitalist institutions–things like this. So Fukuyama ended up being right in a way, but that ended up being a very bad thing for all of us.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
Os dois mil são outro eco recorrente neste zine repreensível. Senhores, baralhando e dando de novo, familiar?: "and part of this, it is worth pointing out, is down to technological developments in publishing" + "and there was some of this in the early webcomics boom of the 2000s–I mean, remember when everyone was going crazy for the 'infinite scroll'?" Doidos. Regressando à história, loop infinito:
There are of course exceptions to what I’m saying, because despite everything, there’s always going to be people who make interesting, accomplished art. [...] Some sort of opposition persisted–as it always does–and I think it’s starting to reemerge. The revenge of the repressed, as it were.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
E que forma tomará essa vingança? Cremos que talvez já tenham escrito esse playbook também.
If we’re talking about ending the end of comics history, we’re talking about cartoonists linking up and sharing the means of comics production, of seizing them for themselves, firing their bosses, making comics from a working-class perspective.
in "The End of Comics History Interview: Jill Deleuze talks to O.F. Stapledon" 16 out 2023
