Presented as Britain 's first computer generated comic, IF Comix Mental announces its central theme on its inside page with the caption TI,is comic is based on the lack of an original idea... Appropriately enough, a magazine produced using a machine that spends most of its time rearranging information created by other means was made by Graham Harwood, one of the 'original' organizers of the Festiva! of Plagiarism, a huge series of 'anti.art' events held in and around London in early 1987.
This is the third issue of IF Comix, the previous two containing a similar polemical thrust, Post-Situ references, collaged imagery and varying degrees of digital post-processing. The first thing you notice about this latest issue, however, is its distinctive 'look'. It is a look that succeeds in breaking away from what was the increasingly predictable style of counter.cuhure work. with its wood.cut graphics and heavy, moody typefaces. In Mental, every picture appears to be cut out of sheets of anodized steel. with hard and crispy tones, simplified in some places but greatly detailed in others and frequently broken up by sharp horizontal bands that slice up the image. The metallic appearance is not like I he usual look of pristine computer shaded geometries, but more CLS though the drawings have been etched or burnt into steel plates, leaving tarnishes and rivulets of molten metal.
These effects have been achieved with image processing software, developed by Graham himself. and applied to the images once they have been scanned or video.grabbed into his computer. Nearly all the artwork is culled from non-original sources, scanned in and processed into a single style - sharp and glistening, but also gritty and even dirty looking, just like the cyberpunk juxtaposition of high tech and low life.
It's about the Gulf War and technology and the metallic look suited that, says Graham. Also, cyberpunk never really had an aesthetic of its own, and I wanted to produce a style for it that fit the present. I wanted it to look like tile images were pressed out of steel, stark and hard. The comic tells the story of a working class fighter pilot in a Gulf War-type scenario, but with the text mainly pieced logether from documents like Marks & Spencer sales promotions, British Pelroleum handouts and news broadcasts. Included with the comic is an A2 poster and a 45 record, composed by sampling and collaging sounds and dialogues from war and sci-fi films and CNN reports, .. 'but it's still danceable, says Graham.
Graham's approach is normally found under the category of 'cuhural activist', and the anti-art component of his work has revolved around opposition to art-centred notions of genius, originality and authenticity. IF Comix - Mental is printed as a 'limited edition' of 1500 copies, but each copy comes with its own license agreement containing such stipulations as prohibiting the licensee from showing their copy of Mental to anyone else without the prior agreement of Harwood himself. However, the only indication of each copy's uniqueness is a copy number printed on the license agreement itself, which is then posted back to the publishers. The licensee is allowed to make 'backup" copies of the comic, like it was a piece of software, but if they transfer the comic to anyone else they have to burn any copies they made as well.
For most cuhural activists working on the political margins of art and culture. magazines and pamphlets have always been an important channel of expression and opposition, Now the comic book form is proving itself a particularly flexible way for independent producers to make themselves seen and heard. Since the mid 1980s, commercial comics have made important advances in leaving their 'kids-only' reputation behind and finding new 'serious' readerships. With these new extended markets and the graphic possibilities of combining image and text. comics offer a medium able to operate as an individual means of 'art.like' expression, but also able to take advantage of its function as a reproduced commercial commodity.
Considering that Graham has had previous project work censored and confiscated from public art galleries, independe!)tly produced comics provide an artist with unparalleled freedom, The same commercial pressures that compel art curators to compromise can prove unexpectedly liberating in the commercial media sector where the only stipulation is to sell. I can do whatever I like in comics, says Graham, it's all escape from art to a wider audience and 1'm independent of publishers and distributors. (Some years ago Graham helped set up the Working Press to support publications dealing with working class culture), You know I see art as a class practice in the UK, but comics work in a wider cultural context. Comics like IF sell from comic shops and bookshops as well as art gallery shops, Graham bases his production around an IBM pc, the Page Maker layout package and image processing software that he learnt to write while on a part-time arts course at City of London Polytechnic. It's all done on cheap and
accessible technology. The PC costs about £1,700 and it cost me about £2,500 to print 1500 copies of the comic.
A lot of Graham's source imagery comes from the comic strips of his youth – the Eagle comic: Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea, Dr. Who. It's partly all attempt to reclai", my boyhood culture. The aim is to rework my culture anew, for myself and for
others. He goes on to explain, after the loss of Marxism. there's no alternative to capitalism. People say but now there's only capitalism, capitalism has won. So there's no resistance to the dominant culture.
The battle for visibility in mass cuhure, for submerged
forms to develop and reassert themselves, is an area in which new opportunities are emerging. The old forms of marginal and working class cuhure and the like will not survive unchanged, but new avenues into cuhural production, many coming from nOIHrt directions like new technologies or practices like scratch and plagiarism can by. pass the more class conscious side of arts training and the associated cuhural and intellectual baggage. The challenge for these new 'cuhural workers' now is not just to throw up new aesthetics and reappropriate cultural forms, but to ('valve subject matteI which is neither art based not propagandist. but relevant dnd polemicaL and at the same lime accessible and even entertaining.