As I was saying to Roy Thomas, the greatest comics stories often have an element of chance, that things just happen. Epics like the War of the Tarim are only partly thought-out and the artist improvises to gain dramatic altitude.
Much the same applies to other standout narratives such as the Lee/Kaluta Starstruck, where the silliness of the story spurs the artist to extra flight’s-fancy. Artist’s flights-of-fancy are the meat-and-bread of comics, and I suppose you could say of narrative art in general from the early Renaissance. Stories which are attempting to be “thought-out” are often too much of the head and with the spontaneous touch absent.
If art is spontaneous so is life so what is it? The natural line is explored by such as Leonardo in cartoons (). A line in nature is spontaneous because it is a product of primeval rhythm. Narrative artists are more true to this in their flights-of-fancy than science is in its thought-out world.
The scientists are unaware of this fact since they live inside their heads. Only the other day the UN announced that for future carbon safety Man should become primarily vegetarian!
The logic for this bizarre statement must be the clearances of Brazilian rainforest and their replacement by cattle which are carbon-producing. However, as previously cited (), cattle which are prairie-fed are really carbon-storers; the carbon is simply cycled back into the prairie through manure.
In Brazil, you assume what happens is “they” build advanced cow-sheds on the cleared forest, so that is not a cyclical system (prev.) It’s more like a logical, sterile system which goes for yield, not balance (strength.)
There is a weakness to that modern system that is to do with a sterile mindset. The ego of such as Baloroso is attracted to a type of logic that is essentially junk. Without the cycles of fertility, there cannot possibly be a carbon balance; hence “they” tell us to do without free ranges.
The best way to achieve a carbon balance is to keep the carbon in the system by fertilizing the prairie. This is old-school organic, mixed farming and for that reason is frowned on by the sterility-merchants of logical junk.
However, there’s no escaping the facts of fertility, and all that happens is that natural rhythms are replaced by the profane serpent, that hides in the mirror of illusions (calculation or the Black Sun, prev.)
This happens in the queasy sexuality of “clean meat”, where you don’t know your ass form your elbow ( ). A fertile system is symmetrical, and the cuts of meat are taken from loin, rump, cutlets etc. This is why a logical system of the head is a type of junk, because it doesn’t know its ass from its elbow. If the modern scene can be taken as a type of Pandora’s Box, there are two ways to look at that.
Artistic flights-of-fancy often strike a chord which approaches the modern dilemma through esoteric settings. Moebius’s wordless Arzach from the early 70s created memorable dizzy images of a seemingly alien landscape and its weird practitioners.
illo missing here
The engineer is attacked by wilting drones who’s virility it may be the machine of the engineer renders weak.
illo missing here
Images of fertility turned profane also appear – the tongue, reptilian urges held dormant? Artists deal in flights-of-fancy in the sense that a line is not a thought-out thing of logical order; it’s just a mark, a shade a rhythm. That is what reality is if it is to have the primal fertility that is strong and pure, undiluted by corrupt reason.