We celebrate the end of the year the only way we know how: through lists, essays, and mixes. Join us as we explore the music and films that helped define the year. More from this series
It’s weird. The idea to do an Exquisite Corpse-style comic for the year-end celebration materialized independently of the plans to do our year-end Chocolate Grinder mix that way. But this has been a popular exercise for a while, this “pass it on” thing. It started as a parlor game (around 1920-ish) called Consequences, played with words in a sort of Mad Libs fashion, and morphed into something heavy hitters in the surrealist camp did to kill time at parties. André Breton and Marcel Duchamp were fans, and even Dalí got into it at one time. It’s no surprise that surrealists would enjoy forcing the Exquisite Corpse to “drink the young wine” — the results are that perfect mix of weird, slightly unsettling, and inexplicably affecting, all while meaning (apparently) nothing in particular. And yet, there does seem to be a reflection of something larger in it when you scratch the surface, not of the end result, but of the process by which the corpse is created. What, after all, is our experience of being human if not improvisation with little insight when we begin?
But never mind that deep stuff. Let’s talk about comics. With such a rich history of Exquisite Corpse in writing and in art, it seemed the logical progression to mash the two together. Comics are the bastard child of words and pictures (although sometimes wordless), one of the strangest forms of narrative around, and the challenge of doing one telephone-style was too tempting to pass up. Our experiment included a volunteer group of seven TMT comic artists, with each person having only the previous installment to go on. We really had no idea how it would turn out. The result is more or less insane, definitely something that, as Breton said, “could not be created by one brain alone.” We hope you like it!
Order: K.E.T. : Joe Hemmerling : Ryan GTG : Richard There : Charlemagne Lazarus Kinsman : Tim Terhaar : Keith Kawaii
We celebrate the end of the year the only way we know how: through lists, essays, and mixes. Join us as we explore the music and films that helped define the year. More from this series
