As in: Prognostication

Warren Ellis has produced four comics under an interesting premise. He writes:

Years ago, I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today.

...

The other day, I was thinking about response songs. Rappers taking shots at each other, covers that answer something in the original, art made in reaction to art. Which, you kind of hope, is not the same as being reactionary.

The small music labels 555 Recordings and Dark Beloved Cloud have singles clubs. People play down the importance of singles these days -- they don't sell the way they used to, downloads bother the music business -- but I love them. Sometimes one song contained on one object is all you need to move the axis of the world. Self-contained and saying all that needs to be said.

Ellis produced four comics, released under the imprint Apparat. They suggest an alternate history of comics--what would comics look like today if superhero comics had not emerged in the thirties? I particularly like Frank Ironwise.

I think the apparat books would make a great course assignment. As always happens when I'm a short spit away from a semester (starts Monday), I have ideas for "something completely different." Thus, I give you a future research arc for one of my Composition 2 courses (feel free to poach):

In Warren Ellis' Apparat comics, he considers what the media of his discipline, comics, would look like if one of the major moments in the medium did not happen. His comics draw on an older tradition and project into the future the premises they suppose. During this course, we will use Ellis' project as a model to produce three small hypertext "singles" that explore your discipline in a divergent future. These explorations will ask what if a key moment in your discipline had never occurred? What would your discipline look like now?

The course would use the Ellis books, of course, as well as a history of comics to explore how Ellis made these conclusions. We'd use Rice's Writing About Cool as our rhetoric and perhaps read The Man in the High Tower to talk about how alternate histories might or might not work.

Posted by briley at February 12, 2005 6:44 AM