Recently, the cover of an old issue of The Comics Journal reminded me of a time when there were so many autobiographical comic books being published, a fatigue set in among readers.
Historically (post- R. Crumb and Justin Green), cartoonists are obligated to deal with the matter of whether or not they should turn their own life into a comic book. Most of us do it vicariously, using fictionalized versions of ourselves, without ever fully revealing our ugliest secrets. Not everyone can do like the late lamented Joe Matt, and kick off an (even more in retrospect) excellent run of his autobio comic Peep Show with an explicit depiction of his favorite jack-off fantasy, including release. I respect him ten times more for that now than I did when he was still kicking about.
Any good cartoonist is constantly looking for fresh material. It becomes second nature; your mind is always hunting the next great idea for a cartoon. It could be a person, an animal, or an object on the ground. The world is your conceptual oyster. When you get into the mode of autobiographical cartooning, your mind begins to shape anecdotes from your life into sequential panels, generally collating them in a setup/delivery format.
If you’ve ever seen the movie American Splendor, there’s an extraordinary depiction of what I’m talking about; Paul Giamatti portrays Harvey Pekar with appropriate mania, scratching out cartoon panels in pencil on Xerox paper. I wish I could find the scene, because it captures exactly how it feels, and Pekar couldn’t even draw. The entire process, from idea to print, is delineated as accessibly as a how-to video.
Check out that film if you haven’t yet, and tell me it doesn’t make you want to draw your own autobiographical comics. The joyous appeal of the pursuit is infectious and tangible. Perhaps the endorphin rush is familiar to you.
Because you might be doing it already, in the form of videos.
Here’s where it gets a little scary, so grab hold of yourselves.
I mentioned Joe Matt, and how his library of autobiographical comics now stands as a historical document of his life, which unfortunately ended prematurely last year. Anything Joe experienced in his lifetime that went undocumented by his pen, might as well have never happened. Whether his depictions of his personal experiences are accurate or otherwise, they will be taken as factual re-enactments of his life.
In the strip I did about Hole 21 years ago, I recounted two separate bad dreams I’d experienced that involved Courtney Love. Later on, I joked somewhere that I had no memory of either dream, and couldn’t prove that I didn’t make them up. And here’s the kicker- none of it even exists unless someone is mentally processing it. There’s no recorded evidence of the events shown, like there would be if I were describing a song.
When I draw myself at a concert, there’s no way for you to hear what I was hearing; what you “hear” in your mind is based on the words and images I utilize to illuminate my perspective of the event. Unless you were physically there at the same concert, at the same time, my experience will forever go undisputed. And unless someone else writes about it, it’s entirely possible that my account will be the only one there is.
Now, imagine someone recording themselves at any public event; it doesn’t have to be a concert. It’s not that the possibility exists to immutably link a human being with a corporate entity, or an abstract concept. It’s the possibility that a human being as they appear at that moment might receive the same association.
A great example of what I’m warning you about came in the form of the “Hawk Tuah” girl, whom I bet you forgot all about until I mentioned her. Her real name is “Haliey”, yes it’s spelled that way, and she parlayed her unfortunate fifteen minutes of e-fame into a podcast about her life (I’m not gonna say its title). It was all downhill from there, but my point is, that will always be the world’s reference point for her existence, for as long as she lives, and afterward.
That is the cost of performative existence. If you make everything about your life a performance, than your performance is what the world will judge you by, and you’re not going to like it.
Livestreams and podcasts are all performative existence; “social media influencers” define it. It’s completely normalized to have disparate personas online and off. You can be almost literally anyone you want to be on the internet, with no effort and typically no repercussions. Users are pretty forgiving if you give them a laugh, but if you get mad when the laugh is on you, they never forget.
You are surrounded by endorphin-edgers and content-coomers who dodder about staring into their phone, gibbering in anticipation of capturing that elusive something that will absorb them into internet culture and provide the mental boost they crave but can’t understand. Your children grow around people who see life as a source of marketable content and a means of self-promotion. Instead of pen and paper, every form of expression involves an expensive phone and one or more social media accounts. Nothing “inspires”; everything is just grist for likes.
The natural urge children have to draw, or paint, is now supplanted by laptops and software. Once they get that first endorphin rush based upon something they created, and a parent reinforces it with a dazzled expression, the method of creativity becomes imprinted. If the kid does something on a computer when that happens, they’ll never bother drawing again. And painting? Forget about it. No parent ever chooses spending a fortune on paint, canvas and brushes over an app that comes free with the home computer (and never has to be scrubbed off the walls). Paint never stood a chance.
I’m not worried about your kids. I’m worried about the kids of the people way, way dumber than you. The kids unwittingly born into a performative existence, a supporting character in the endless movie that is their parent’s life. Thanks to laws and common decency, these kids are kept “off-camera”, while Mom or Dad devotes all their attention to a few dozen total strangers. Being that this style of child-rearing runs counter to centuries of traditional parenting, up to and including our own, how ya think that’s gonna work out in 15 years or so there, chippy chip?
I told you this would get scary. Think about all the young creative minds right now, unwittingly ossified by their parents’ narcissism and ignorance. Think about, historically, what causes creative urges to turn destructive. Neglect. Feeling ignored. Feeling disrespected, or cheated.
If a child never develops the means to properly express their emotions, they will never learn to control them. They’ll become someone who chooses violence rather than words. All because no one ever thought to stick a pencil or a brush in their hand. They stuck a smartphone in their hands and called it a day. Hey, at least the kid’s quiet, right? Aren’t I always complaining about noisy kids?
If I hadn’t grown up reading books, actual hard-to-finish, musty-smelling, bound-paper books, you wouldn’t be reading these words. They wouldn’t be here. If I hadn’t grown up reading underground comics, this site wouldn’t exist at all. Neither would my other one. If I’d never been inspired to pick up a pencil and draw, I’d currently be serving several consecutive life sentences in prison for multiple homicide.
Now, I grant you, I was introduced to television, computers, and video games before I was ten. When making comparisons with the present age, keep the following in mind:
- Seeing any specific television show required being in front of the television set at a specific date and time. If you weren’t in front of a TV, tough shit, you never saw that show again. Entrusting a VCR to record while you were away never seemed to work right, so you always ended up recording in front of the TV anyway.
- Home computers were a completely different ball of wax prior to 1990. Much of the hardware was solid state with tons of wires and didn’t look like anything you’d trust a small child around.
- You only had a computer in the home if your family had a damn good reason; mine was because my dad wanted a word processor to print out tennis schedules. I justified my use of it by learning to write my own video games, with the help of magazines like COMPUTE. My dad was tired of spending money on computer games that turned out to be shitty, so he told me to write my own. I also used to draw my own box art in colored markers for the games I designed, when I wasn’t around (or allowed to use) the computer.1
- The image quality of your video game system depended on the quality of your TV set. This is why more primitive games worked so well, because most people’s televisions were fairly small. All today’s wall-sized giant-slab monitors were utter science fiction. Everything was a cathode ray tube (CRT), and the idea of one of those boulders above a certain size becomes laughably impractical. How would you get it into your house? Why would our mothers allow such a thing?
- Literally nothing I witnessed throughout my entire childhood made adults as angry as seeing children happily enjoying television.
For those of you born in this century; you have to excuse my festering resentment of the fact that without question, you were encouraged by your elders to sit in front of a screen and behave while they did something else, as though there were no other option. I have to try not to hate your guts. For real.
If there were only some way to make you understand that my generation had parents who would physically abuse you if you insisted upon watching TV. My generation had parents who didn’t even have to hit their kids; the mere suggestion was enough to do the trick. “If you don’t get away from that television/computer game right this instant and go outside, I am going to knock you into next week.” And that was our mothers.
So we went to our friend’s house, and watched TV there… until his mother screamed at us to get out. So we went and found some other kids in the same boat, and had ourselves some actual tactile life experiences. Climbing trees, riding bikes, running through the woods. You know, childhood.
The people who give their children smartphones aren’t doing it to stimulate them, or to share something to do; they do it to pacify their children, while they live their own life as they did before kids came along. Kids imitate their parents, so if a baby sees Mama focused on her phone all the time, there’s gonna be a lot of crying until somebody finally caves in. An infant or toddler is handed a piece of communications equipment worth upwards of several hundred dollars, without a second thought, all because Mama needs some peace at the laundry.
But hey- what’s the big deal, right? I’m probably overthinking it. A smartphone to a child is probably not much different than any shiny toy gizmo. There just happens to be no precedent for a shiny toy gizmo that practically the entire adult world is constantly fixated upon, everywhere you look. And kids, you know, have a tendency to pick up on things.
But I digress.
In one of Joe Matt’s comics, he draws himself (now with realistic lips, marking the correction from the Drawn & Quarterly strips) being angrily confronted by a couple on the street. They saw an issue of Peep Show with characters clearly and unflatteringly based on them, and they want to take a chunk out of Joe’s non-existent ass2. He meekly offers a defense of having changed their names and descriptions (and the name of the man’s band), but still he barely escapes unscathed. This is the chief danger of performative existence; unless you make them look they way they want to look, no one wants to be a character in your little show. And that goes double if the show’s on paper.
On video, performative existence eschews the craft and art inherent in creative expression, while at the same time offering a shot at the mother of all endorphin shots- widespread acceptance.
You know it’s out there. You’ve seen kids get it. All it takes is a phone camera and the right milieu in which to insinuate yourself. The more you record, the more chances you get at the big time; a view count with three digits and a K.
Maybe even an M. And it can happen literally overnight.
Let’s say for example it happens to you. After you appear in a video that goes viral, a gigantic portion of the world’s online users are suddenly familiar with your name and face. Not only that; your behavior at a single point in your life. So now from this point forward, almost everyone you meet for the rest of your life might have a preconceived notion of how you will act if they happen to confront you. Depending upon if even a few members of the public have voiced disapproval of your past behavior (as they have seen it or simply heard about it), you can become very paranoid, very quickly.
When you draw, or write your personal experiences out, then the medium is the first thing most people will judge those experiences on. I can cite countless examples of hilarious comics based upon the most traumatic and unpleasant experiences, from too many brilliant cartoonists and writers to list here. Those comics are funny because they were created as a means of making light of a dark subject. They demonstrate the process of turning a negative experience into accessible humor, in essence inverting its polarity to positive. Without the origin point of some specific trauma, the story doesn’t exist.
By contrast, think about someone who engages in performative existence by streaming. Unless the streamer is masked, the audience has no need to suspend disbelief regarding the host’s emotional state; their face is clearly readable. Unless they inform us, we have no reason to assume they feel differently than their expression indicates. We have no freaking clue about their childhood, parents, or offspring unless they inform us. Without the classic artifice of cartoons on paper to buffer them apart from reality, we see them as any other person we don’t know face-to-face, so as soon as they’re out of sight, they’re forgotten, just by nature of how our minds catalog other human beings.
Which matters more; the joke that made you laugh, or the face of the person who told it to you? Which do you try hardest to remember?
Think about memes, and how ingeniously they spread ideas around the world, almost exclusively through the format of one-panel cartoon humor. Words and images that can be rapidly absorbed, just like a comic strip. In all but the rarest cases, no one cares who made the meme, as long as it’s funny or legitimately clever. Memes are surmised to occur naturally on the web, seemingly without any one person’s input, but rather that of a whole, a collective consciousness encompassing the Earth.
The chances that any one streamer or influencer will become world-famous based upon their appearance alone are zilch. Whatever your life experiences might be, people have no reason to know you even exist. If you choose to bait the world’s attention with negative behavior, don’t be surprised when that behavior becomes the public’s default impression of you.
Anyone can record themselves preparing food, and put the video on YouTube. Does that mean they’ll get as many views as Gordon Ramsay does?
Now, let’s say instead of recording the food, one were to draw the result in a sketchbook, maybe just once a week for special meals, including the recipe each time in longhand, and keep it up for a whole year. What would one have in 52 weeks’ time? Even if they couldn’t draw?
Would it have more value than 52 videos displaying the preparation of the same meals?
Which has more redeeming social value; a video recording of a violent occurrence, or an artist’s interpretation of it? Which provokes more thought in the outside observer? Which endures longer in the minds of the public?
100% of your information about the world outside your immediate surroundings comes from one place, through your computer and phone. Even if you claim to utilize varied sources, you still get 100% of your news from the internet. Nobody gets different newspapers and magazines anymore, with which to absorb a healthy spectrum of opinion. Nope, too wasteful. Better to get almost literally every idea from the internet, then forget every bit of it by tomorrow, before you turn on the internet again.
No one ever regrets the embarrassing pictures they didn’t take.
The decision to live one’s life as an ongoing performance is a complex one, for many reasons. It is not a life to be entered recklessly, or insincerely. It requires a commitment from the performer that the show must go on, even if a hundred people are booing and hurling rotted cabbage. It means if anyone catches you with your guard down, when you’re not “on”, you’re done. And brother, you better be “on” 24 hours a day, because you will be tested, at random, by total strangers who know more about you than you know about them.
It’s like the Mt. Everest of social media. No one’s made it to the top, but still many try, eventually dying in the process, their bodies frozen forever in the same gaudy outfits, exhibited as a cautionary tale for those who know better. It’s like The Gong Show without the gong, or the panel, or the overall elegance. Just some nobody gurning in front of a webcam. Famous for fucking up.
If you’re a parent of young children, the internet should be as welcome a presence in their world as a rapist with a bloody erection. If anyone suggests your child should have a smartphone, threaten to beat them about the head and neck with something heavy until they change the subject. You alone define your offspring’s happiness. It means as much about buying things as you let it.
You shouldn’t sit your kids in front of Disney movies; you should tell your kids that if they practice enough, they can make better movies. Your kids should think stuff like Disney is lame and for babies who play with dolls. Show them how animation is made by making a flipbook. No child has ever been unimpressed by a flipbook; it’s like showing them how to perform a magic trick. All for a fraction of the cost of anything Disney, and you don’t have to be able to draw.
I’m not even a parent (nor guardian), and I can tell you that the activity I just described has more positive and enduring impact on a kid’s life than a thousand movies, Disney or otherwise. More than any video. More than anything on a screen, large or small.
The people you see everywhere engaged in a performative existence have reached the end of their creative development. They are obligated by their own actions to be consistent with who they were at one specific time, or risk confusing their internal audience. In reality, they could be completely unknown to the world, and most likely are. They are ordinary people who started coping by pretending they were the star of their own show. Fewer than three strangers acknowledged them, which is enough to enable anybody’s delusions if they’re desperate.
All those girls you see on Instagram, in skimpy bikins, shaking their lady-parts about; they’re not looking at us with those adoring glances. They’re looking at themselves that way, reflected in their phone screen or web cam.
Does it really matter, though? You can just pretend she’s looking at you like that. For all intents and purposes, it feels the same as reality. Maybe better.
After all; it’s just a performance.
- In the 1980’s, sitting at the computer for more than a couple of hours was really pushing your luck. We were all told television would ruin our eyes, and it more or less did. ↩︎
- This is how deep into Joe Matt’s personal lore I go, and how much of an influence he had on me as a young cartoonist. One of the “true facts” he chose to reveal about himself in his earlier strips was that he had no ass. A college friend of mine claimed the same ailment, and his pants looked like how Joe drew legs. Also guys who have no ass tend to mention it with weird frequency, joking about it. I just never thought it was that funny, it makes me sad, the idea of having no ass. ↩︎
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