GRGR(10) - Plasticman

[davemarc]

> From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
> 
> >> (206-7) Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out a keyhole, around a
corner
> >> and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist's
> >>lab, out of
> >> whose faucet Plas's head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw,
is
> >>just  >>  >> emerging.
> 
> At 11:03 AM +1100 9/25/99, rj wrote:
> >[snip] Pynchon narrates the comic strip
> >sequence as though it were a movie, or indeed, a real event in time
[snip]
> 
> Or, indeed, narrating just as if this were a sequence of comic book or
> comic strip panels.

Indeed.  Here's how Art "Maus" Spiegleman narrated a solitary Plas panel in
his article about the comic's creator, Jack Cole, in The New Yorker
(4/19/99):

"The art ricochets like a racquetball slammed full force in a closet.  Your
eye, however, is guided as if it were a skillfully controlled pinball,
often by Plastic Man himself acting as a compositional device.  His
distended body is an arrow pointing out the sights as it hurtles through
time. In just a single panel, our hero chases along a footpath in a park,
trailing a mugger.  Running from the rear of the picture, Plastic Man's
S-curved body echoes the path itself as he loops around one pedestrian in
the distance and extends between two lovers about to kiss--lipstick traces
are on his elongated neck as he passes them--to swoop up between an old
man's legs like an enormous penis wearing sunglasses and stare into his
startled face."

d.