i wanted to write something abt comic inspirations for the killer games
lots of people have tried to figure out the distinction between videogames and movies, comics. and for me the distinction is unnecessariness. a comic or movie can be deliberate as a succession of images (even if the sensibility behind it is anything but), while videogames always seem haunted by a kind of redundancy. we arrive in a new area with a striking, cinematic camera perspective... and promptly walk the wrong way. our character grinds against an invisible wall for a second or two before we reorient ourselves and turn around. in the process the camera moves to give us visions that are anything but considered - clipping through a wall, rotating from the cinematic point of view to a disconcertingly banal one as we see the same place from a new perspective, "shot" after "shot" that nobody wanted or ever really thought about. potentially infinite combinations of things that weren't that important in the first place; we go here, we go there, all the parts of a game we think of as meaningful existing surrounded by an ocean of dead time and empty affordances. we don't need to progress the frame. we can walk around in there instead, forever.
and so videogames are bad art, in the sense that they almost always take longer to play through than they do to apprehend. even our favourites seem embarrassingly padded and indiscriminate when we compare them to the classics of another form; at best they seem more akin to pre-20thc divertissements, all those panoramas and dioramas and waxworks and moving dolls, than they do the implied concision of the work of art. but it's exactly this badness that makes them linger in our affections - their smeared and dreamlike qualities, the way it's hard to follow just what's going on. the strange glimpse of timelessness, the way it means elements of videogame imagery seem to sink straight into the subconscious without needing to pass understanding on the way. (all this is also why i believe gertrude stein's "the making of americans" is the closest thing to a videogame before they were invented yet).
so. i like comics and am attracted to the ways they mix visual chaos and narrative drive and vice versa. but i don't really think it's a case of plucking out what they do well and dropping that into the vgame form. instead we sorta have to imagine taking those beautiful comic devices and inflating them like digdug with his gun - filling them with the empty, dead, meaningless time of videogames, and seeing what new thing results. sometimes the inflated thing bears a resemblance to the original, like balloons of snoopy; sometimes they do not. but in general i think people making videogames should be less hung up on "what works" and more intrigued by the possibilities of "what doesn't work, but in surprising ways." what else do we have?
a lot of the inspirations for the games in anthology of the killer are old adventure comics - tight, serialised genre fiction, often with a briskness that was exciting to me specifically for how much it differed from the endless langour of videogames. despite people's nice comments i do not feel like any of the killer games would be good as comics, at all - but you can sort of see the bones under there, bones carefully padded with thick greasy clumps of videogame meat.
Tintin was a big one for me. a lot of people point to the later books, which are more detailed, humane, and a little less crazily racist (by midcentury european comics standards) than the earlier work. but my favourites as a kid were those early books, especially Tintin In America and Cigars Of The Pharoah, just because of that breakneck and unbelievable quality: they take place not in the real world, or even like the "exotic locales" beloved in adventure fiction, but in a kind of bare and stagelike labyrinth made up entirely of basements piled upon basements, trapdoors and hidden corridors and underworld hqs, which happen to have the most cursory picturesque trappings piled on top. every row of panels ends on a cliffhanger - tintin is forever being put into new, elaborate death contraptions, only to survive by totally unrelated mix-up or coincidence - and as a result the narrative logic takes on a kind of delirious, impersonal paranoia. i think the convention now is that you shouldn't see the hand of the author behind the plot - part of the fun of these comics is that it visibly reaches in every page, to mangle someone or shake things up whenever they look like they might get boring. the characters scramble in its wake. an image of fate...
Dick Tracy has something of the same feverishness, and some good villains. but again what's surprising about it is the way that even the villains seem at the mercy of this brutal, churning narrative machinery. chester gould had A Vision of the world in which crime simply could not succeed, because to be a criminal was to set oneself against a whole society, and to be one person against a million was to inevitably set yourself up for destruction. dick tracy himself can end up feeling more a framing device, like the crypt keeper, who mostly serves to introduce all these stories of bad ends: criminals recognized by the milkman, forced to flee and steal a car, cutting their wrist on glass from the broken window, forced to crawl bleeding through a junkyard only to eventually freeze to death while hiding in a meat locker from patrolling cops. Crime Does Not Pay!!
(i'm not sure if it's a weird aspect of the collected versions, but old dick tracy comics also sometimes have a fun narrative device where they will simply skip over some key moment in narrative - was gould having trouble drawing it or did his imagination just impatiently want to rush to something else? - and then have a character recite what just happened in the panel instead. sometimes this happens in place of the story's climax! the constant slipping sense of emphasis is a delight.)
Uncle Scrooge comics - heretical as it may be but i find my tastes lean more toward don rosa than carl barks with these.. at least for my own purposes... as someone who doesn't do a lot of narrative work i feel like i had to sort of construct my sense of how a story even works, like the most basic sense of how things follow or ideally wrap up on each other. barks's stories often have that feeling of verve and economy that we associate with a natural storyteller. but what interests me is that rosa's do not - my read is that he approaches comic storytelling more like an engineering challenge, taking a suitcase full of narrative devices like gears and wheels and trying to hook them up to each other in such a way that "a satisfying donald duck narrative" comes out when you set them all spinning. i feel like a certain blunt appreciation of narrative as gizmo, as contrivance and mechanism, is part of what i enjoy about pulp forms - a kind of value neutral quality, like you can feed any kind of raw material in there and the end result will somehow "work", will hold together, even if it's in a way you don't fully understand.
other comics: i want to write more about horror comics in particular later, but beyond that... a lot of old humour comics have the same rapid-fire pacing as adventure ones, and being framed as "comedy" only means they can be even more relentless and weird about their plot contruction. i mentioned john stanley briefly before but also dick briefer's horror-comedy "frankenstein", anything by boody rogers, ogden whitney's "herbie", harvey kurtzman's occasional humour comics that have the same sense of seething energy as his war ones...
this is the most cursory gesture at some potentially infinite rabbit holes. i make it not to say that videogame people should simply "Level Up!" (videogame reference!) their work by pillaging from new sources, although it couldn't hurt. but because everything they do is something new to fail at, something else to mangle and make indecipherable by putting it in the videogames machine, something else to shoot with the dig dug gun and see how much emptiness it can take before it pops and what shape that emptiness takes when molded by this new form. divertissements can be a lot of fun. here is part of a poem by paul klee.
The big animals : despondent
at table : unsated.
But the small cunning flies
scrambling up slopes of bread
inherit Buttertown.
