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So recently I made a presentation on Grant Morrison for a comic class. I feel like I screwed it up, but there was one point I really wanted to make that was informed mostly by Ultra Comics. I figured I'd see if I can articulate it here, add to the interpretations of just what all is happening in that issue. In my opinion, the Gentry is not just a symbol of the comic books industry or despair or something similar, though it could certainly stand for all of those. Ultra, by the same token, isn't really a symbol of destruction of despair through analysis; after all, he seems to be defeated and isolated by the Intellectron's influence shortly after the final battle. The whole comic, to me anyways, seems to point to the idea that the Gentry is our idea of what comics are. The Gentry comes through the Oblivion Machine, which then chains us to the Gentry, and we accept it as such. That process seems awfully similar to how we accept ideas and allow them to affect our views of the world. Throughout the issue, we're given themes of sight being a major factor. The very first page has Ultra with one blue eye and one eye that was red and yellow, one that looks surprisingly similar to Intellectron's. That eye is the one that's zoomed in on as he's telling us not to turn the page. The very issue itself is an abstraction of sight; despite the fact that we see Ultra as a superhero, he describes his body as though it were composed in the same fashion of a comic, which he is. Our senses are questioned just as much as we are focusing on closeups of eyeballs and how things are viewed. Which then brings us to just how both the Intellectron and Ultra's fate apply to the idea of how comics are perceived to be. Throughout the critical sphere there seem to be two pools of thought; one informed by revisionism, the other informed by reconstructionism. Both sides seem quick to point out the other side as the figurative Antichrist, the reason why comics suck so much now unlike how they used to be. Both sides tend to reduce the other, and by extension a part of comics themselves, as worthless in some way, or tiring, or at least of lesser worth. Even outside of the critical spheres, when people tend to refer to comics, they often find themselves referring to more negative aspects of it, or how negatively it is portrayed, or how certain ideas or trends or people don't belong in the culture even if there is no justifiable reason for them to leave. In other words, people see comics through a negative lens, they see everything wrong with it and believe that, at its core, that's all it ever will be now. In this case, the ideas we have are represented by the Intellectron, the Gentry, and that chain that anchors that idea to us is the Oblivion Machine. Because of this, Ultra isn't infected and being ordered to go to quarantine after the fight. We, the people inside his head, are the ones being told that. The thing that fights off the Intellectron is not just a removal, a sense of looking beyond what we want it to see for us, but rather cynical, violent barbs delivered with just the same amount of "this poo poo sucks and here's why" that made us accept the Gentry to begin with. The people that made those comments did not suddenly become able to see past Intellectron/their biases, they just simply pushed and attacked until it went away. We've already been infected long before Intellectron, long before Ultra Comics was ever published. It just took this long, perhaps, to manifest the infection in a way that we can see it absolutely, and we can address it for good this time. All we have to do is realize that those biases are not all there are, and that there is more to this medium than what we chose to see before. Hopefully I was succinct or legible enough to get my points across. I realize this is heading into pretentious sappy stuff, and when I tried to convey it last time it all sort of came out a word salad. Still, this series of comics has made me really drat excited for comics in general, and I can't wait to see how the whole thing wraps up!
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Apr 13, 2015 03:08
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:53 |
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