An open letter to Josh Dysart

Josh Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli's UNKNOWN SOLDIER was released by Vertigo this week. It is a stunning piece of work; relevant, angry, frightening, and (dare I say?) important. Shades of Michael Golden's THE NAM, but with the fury of mid-eighties Frank Miller and the moral ambiguity of Garth Ennis's or Grant Morrison's best work. It reimagines the Unknown Soldier in a complete new context, that of the civil war of Uganda, and the empathy and terror it brings to bear on this almost completely unknown (int he USA, at least) conflict is nothing short of breathtaking. I think the world NEEDS books like this. It's fast, it's scary, it's intelligent, and, damnit, it's exciting.

At the end of the book, when the last page has been turned, after catching my breath, I read the coda that Josh Dysart wrote to explain himself. In it, Josh expresses, repeatedly, the nervousness he feels that he may be doing a disservice to this subject. As if the problems of the world are too big, the limitations of pulp comics are too small, and he is just too damn white and Western to be able to do this right. That inspired me to write a quick note to Josh, and I think it's perfectly alright to share my thoughts and philosophy with the world.

Josh

I understand that you have an ambivalent relationship with your creative endeavor. You worry that you cheapen, debase, make kitch, misrepresent. The moral ambiguity you feel must be terrifying, I get the impression that this conflict nearly inspires you to abandon the task set before you- to write a comic book that matters.

But somewhere deep in this conflict and doubt are the seeds that promise to raise your efforts to the pedestal of high art. It prevents your work from becoming over-ardent, strident, heavy-handed and preachy. See, making art, the good kind anyway, is about testing limits. And the limits your temperament sets for yourself are the most difficult kind to probe. Cross those lines, lines as fuzzy as a Rothco color field to perceive yet as sharp as a cat’s claw to violate, and your work becomes the steaming pile of cultural misappropriation pulp that you most fear, to be taken no more seriously than Madonna dancing on a bed in bondage gear while photos of Darfur atrocities are projected on 50-foot TV screens. This is the dance of death of art. If you can dance that dance and stay on the right side of that cat’s claw, then you stand a chance of achieving the highest aspirations of art- to communicate, illuminate and educate.

Sure, plenty of artists WANT to do this, and more often that we would care to witness, this earnest desire to be relevant overwhelms the subject they wish to communicate. The form, the audience experience, is sublimated to the message and both are lost to the steaming pile of cultural bullshit that white-walled art galleries, black-box theater troupes, independent book shop poetry slammers and nekkid cock-and-balls interpretive dance companies inflict on the hoi-poloi.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, you do not debase your subject by acknowledging the limitations of your art form, as you appear to fear. Quite the opposite! I am a modernist in this sense, that art must acknowledge the limitations of its form. Painting did not truly mature into an expressive, poetic art until painters acknowledged that a painting is what it is- paint on a canvas- and the art of it begins and ends right there- as paint on a canvas- and the art is really somewhere between that beginning and ending. A painting that tries to derive its relevance from anywhere else, from densely written artists’ statements or staid institutionally-imposed contextualizations, will ultimately fail the test, and will fall and be forgotten. The meaning of art begins and ends with WHAT IT IS, and while that may seem somewhat belittling and empty to the idealist, if you fail to acknowledge the formal limitations of your art, then you are likely to have your message spill across the borders. This is NOT a good thing! If you’re going to say something with art, you have to say it with art alone.

But here is also where the danger of stridency and heavy-handedness rears its ugly head. For if you have something to say, why not simply say it? To that I say that acknowledging the limitations of art does NOT simply mean that you cower from that cat’s claw edge I spoke of earlier. The dangerous challenge of art is to explore the limitations of form and content right up to the point where you draw blood. Get that claw into the flesh, make them feel it, then withdraw and do it again, do not tear them to shreds, do not beat them over the head, just give them something to think about, death by 1000 cuts. At the end of a day spent with art, they should be damp, dark and exhausted, and unaware that the blood they are covered with, damp and dark, is their own. Stridency and heavy-handedness is a two-by four with a nail driven through it, they call undue attention to their intentions. Art must be a subtle knife, well-concealed until a split-second flash of silver delivers the fatal strike.

You, Josh, know that you are working in a debased art form, seemingly better suited to funny animals and adolescent power fantasies, and it terrifies you that something you really care about may sink to the level of those pamphlets that surround it on the spinner rack. But the problem with those stories is not that they acknowledge their limitations, it’s that they REVEL in them. Remember, art is about acknowledging limitations and TESTING them. It’s about taking your ideas as far as they can go without stepping over the line into the land of the awkward and obvious. Most comic books do not dance the dance of death. They are quite content, happy to simply be what they are. God knows why.

But you, Josh, have something on your mind, and you fear that comics may not be a big enough vessel to contain it. Will the limits of comics, culture, upbringing, and whatever other bugaboos you fear conspire to lay your good intentions low? Nine times out of ten, the answer to that question is a resounding, heartbreaking yes. This is the hardest part of being an artist, the failure. But once in a while, it all comes together and it works. An artist must endure all the times he fucks it up before he can ever enjoy the euphoria of getting perfect-right. That is not to say that I think you’ve ever “fucked it up.” I’ve always enjoyed your work. But I also know that YOU have, in your way, ENDURED your work. This is why I root for you! If anybody can make it work, it is you. You endure!

And I think UNKNOWN SOLDIER has the potential of becoming just that kind of work. It’s a big idea that is dancing the dance of death, on the cat’s claw edge, it’s all right there between the first page and the last, and I see the flash of silver of its very subtle knife. It is your BEST work yet.

Allen




Again, UNKNOWN SOLDIER rocks. Josh is my hero. Go buy this book!