             |
| Slugs first appeared in the Centenary College Conglomerate for four semesters from 1997-99. It was originally concieved as a highly experimental exercise in the decontruction of traditional comic strip narratives in which such traditional elements as characterization (and, hence, gender distinctions) and setting (and therefore socio-economic distinctions) are deliberately excised from the contextual identity of the strip. The slugs themselves, consequentially, were imagined to be indistinct corporeal entities removed from the bounderies of corporeal space whose primary defining characteristic was the fact or quality of their own corporeality, or to paraphrase Jaques Derrida's in his famous 1968 essay La pratique des choses parlantes qui n'y a pas il mais peut encore être regardé , "distinctly indistinct non-corporeal corporealitivity."
Through this minimalist exploration of sequencial illustrated narratives, it was my hope to bring into sharper contrast the philosophical, psychological and semantic oppositions which had provided the basis for nearly all forms of Western humor; namely the universal existential angst that mankind suffers as a result of experiencing his own existenence. The underlying thematic metastructure of Slugs therefore, was that humor (specifically, humour) could arise only through the objective absurdist revelation of instances of profound suffering and confusion or, as Nietszche termed it, verwirrenleiden. This concept can be most clearly demonstrated below, in the very first Slugs strip. |
|||||
 |
|||||
 |
|||||
| Predictably, the responce to such a boldly avant-garde approach to humor was met with a mixture of confusion and violent student protests. In response to this, I pursueded Tommy Welch to illustrate the strip so that I could have more of an opportunity to hone the subtleties of the strip's dialogue. Fortunately, Tommy was a far better illustrator than I. Unfortunately, however, it soon occured to me that my entire approach to deconstructing the underlying memetic structure of humorous constructions was complete bullshit, so from then on I just stole all my ideas from old Zippy the Pinhead compilations, hastily scribbled a last-minute script the night before the paper went to press and stalked around Tommy's living room drinking straight gin and loudly slurring at him to "draw 'em funnier, goddammit."
If you would like to read the strips, you are welcome to do so by clicking here. |
|||||
