Insect Heaven and Other Works of Art

There is no single antidote to the effects of living in the world. Everybody knows this, more or less, except for the lucky few who make a total escape into alcohol. But they pay their own price, and are forced to encounter the ghosts of their drunkenness at some point. So you take to looking around for distractions. There are all kinds, of course, distraction being the main industry of the world since time immemorial – distraction being at fault for a majority of atrocity, and interestingly enough being quite a lucrative market.

But I'm going a bit off course. There's not much I can do about it, to be honest. This is how the blog slops when it's a sloppy blog, and, as Bukowski put it, "...the shit shits." That's how you know he was ultimately, whatever his failings, a masterful poet. It's almost too easy to think the age of the raconteur is over, much like the era of the troubadour or the psychopomp. Although I know that more or less all of those industries are alive and kicking, though in a variety of new circumstances and costumes.

I do enjoy comics, though. It's more or less a casual thing, and I was recently talking to a peer who told me that he thought the comic was in decline. And I don't mean stand-up comic, you commie. I mean comic illustration – even a comic book though I haven't held one in at least a decade (and that one was probably shitty) – as in the type mostly found in the newspapers. You got Doonesbury and all kinds of excellent shit and there's also the somewhat weaker efforts that appear and you deal with it, because usually there's one or two good comics. My peer told me the newspaper associated comic was in decline because of readership loss and all that. And I told him there was even a small chance he was right, but that comics would do just fine on the internet.

Or if not 'just fine' something like 'surviving in a vivacious marketplace, nonetheless'. Look around at the minimum of one thousand webcomics. Dozens of them at any time have at least ten thousand followers. One of my favorite comics is Bizarro, which I used to read in the newspapers and now follow on line. Bizarro is a great and sometimes most excellent comic, not afraid of controversy and politically extremist – the perfect antidote to such sentimental nostrums, bromides, or distractions as Family Circus, or... For Better or Worse and I don't know, I stopped reading newspaper comics seriously years ago and now it's just a wasteland of inoffensive, reflexive pablum and reactionary nonsense, 'random' zany hijinks or dying comics you used to like.

There was great comic about Insect Heaven, and that kind of thing is exactly the sort of healthy distraction from the world that a comic is supposed to be. Instead of obeying a narrative, this is a sort of non sequituresque business with an excellent track-record of amusing, funny comics. Plus the author recently posted something about disconnecting from the 24/7 news cycle and kicking it on your own terms, which is an opinion I can assent to being broadcast via the internet, to anyone who cares to listen. In fact it should be announced from loudspeakers like all other truth, but that's another matter entirely, which only the government knows to solve.