Monday, February 02, 2009

Pep 5: The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance



Okay, at first I tried to believe that the action on this cover is supposed to take place underwater. Because I see, um, ship-ish looking things. And air bubbles.

Oh, the heck with it! This can only be interpreted as a fractured surrealist landscape colored with a variegated miasma of pastels. It looks like someone put the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and R. Crumb in a blender with some art chalk, and then dipped an issue of Captain America in it.

The Shield has a rudder up his butt, bringing new meaning to "hard to port!", and is blowing off his right foot with a torpedo, surrounded by negative-space-infused textual elements, and ambiguous shapes that could be salmon or submarines, propellers or women's hats, streams or banana leaves, pontoons or hot dog buns.


These illusions disillusioned me; how could our hero, The Shield, participate in such a patent and aggressive display of wicked Surrealism, the Enemy of All That is Good in Comics? And then it hit me, like a torpedo exploding on my shinbone:

The Shield is FIGHTING. The Shield is fighting back surrealism!

Phew! NOW I can sleep tonight!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

And after the Shield defeats Surrealism and its sneering sidekick Dadaism, perhaps he can take on Post-Modern Deconstructionist Metafiction!

SallyP said...

And he's laughing as he does so.

Is it me, or does the Shield have particularly meaty thighs?

Scipio said...

Thanks, Steve. You've given me an idea.

Watch for it.

Jon the Intergalactic Gladiator said...

A melty clock or two would've made it easier to tell.

Nerdoh News said...

Hey guys,
Trying to email Absorbascon to let him know about my new venture that he/you might like, but cant find his email on the blog?

Anyway...

www.nerdoh.com
or
http://t-shirts.nerdoh.co.uk/2009/02/iron-man-new.html

Cheers

Phil

Unknown said...

Question: Let's say that Heat Wave gets into a fight with Clock King at CK's lair. The lair is burning, clocks are melting left and right...is that surrealism, or just a really crappy story idea?