VIDHERO WEB STRIPS

INsights: not feeling very funny today, I expose.This strip was inspired by a smoking break. I watched a fly passing through and around a simple archaic spider web between two wooden poles on my back deck. I wondered if a spider was just out of sight, drooling and hoping that his pathetic few strands would be enough to catch this prize. I wondered if the fly could even see it. Why do flies slam into webs all the time? Can they not see them? or are they too stupid to care? I suppose there isn’t a lot of cultural safeguarding being handed down by devoured flies. I wondered what it would be like for the fly to buzz along happily, perhaps daringly choose to fly through the little space afforded by deck support struts, and then perhaps notice the web at the last minute. i wondered if the simple web would be made more complicated by the cliche kaleidoscope vision. Do flys even see like that? Or do they form it all into one extra 3D image? hmm.

blah blah. I thought about this for several minutes, then decided I’d like to make a strip about it. I liked the idea of drawing a fly stretching out a web with it’s velocity. I wondered about doing a final frame with something like “just like Speed Racer!” to try and make it a commentary on movies.

And then the art happened. bleh. and i’m not proud. but whatever. Worse, my copy of illustrator died after a ton of work, refusing to let me save or export of copy out the work. so i took a screenshot and rebooted. god i was angry. And in that angry vein, I sat and watched the first half of Robocop, while running through updates for all my adobe programs.

After the strip was done i toyed with several diffent “punch lines”.  but ended up just deleting them, and making the text box integrate into the background. wee. I also called it “WEBB”, but then changed this to “NATURE” and then changed it to the current title, which is the name of an upcoming documentary about a perfomance artist who set up a line between the twin towers back in the 70s. hmm. There’s a story there, about the ways in which this strip is a commentary on a promotional post card for that movi. which i was intruiged by on several levels, but don’t think i’ll pay to see. But that’s not a story worth telling at the moment.

EDIT: I should add the explanation of the “obvious”. because it’s not that obvious.
- “A Simple Trap” is the poorly made web, and in my mind refers to both “a funny web comic” and “quality artistic expression.”
- “Complicated by Vision” refers to the fly’s eyesight making the web more complicated than it really is, and in my mind relates to the way all art is based on a simple theme (or core goal) in the creators head but appears much more complicated to the audience (who lack the benefit of insight).
- “Resiliently Inescapable” covers the fly’s inability to escape the sticky trap, and the way that for all your applied meanings the audience can never penetrate the artist’s core intention or truly understand the art.
- the final frame represents the word box being caught by the trap of this web comic, with it’s words unable to escape. It has become a part of the art (to such a degree that it is not clearly text box any more). It also represents the word box (and any words it may have had to offer) being merely part of the background now. I was fooling around with various words to finish the poem, like “existing eternally” or “a part of art never dies” or “ever entertaining”. All of which were meant to contrast the image of fly that is now totally fucked. Ultimately the final frame is trying to say “you the audience have been caught in the art trap that this web comic is presenting, and we aren’t offering you any easy exit.” So it’s just another 4th-wall-breaking bit of egotistical preaching. Perhaps i should have put “2 weeks later” in the final frame. Because to me, the fly is dead and dessicated there, but still representing the final state of the concept. In a way the strip is dead by the forth frame, which is why there is no text to read in the text box that is stretched behind the wooden poles. hmm.

This is what it means to me. I’d be fascinated to hear what people thought it meant, if in any way different. Like, did anyone really think it was just the poorly told story of a fly? … I wish i could have come up with a snappy joke to insert or infer at the end, so people could still enjoy it even if they didn’t think about it. but that is my failure (and the trap i keep charging into full speed when putting these strips together so quickly with such a weird abstract goal of ambiguity).

blah blah.