One of the many great gags in Tales Designed to Thrizzle: Volume 1—comprising the first four issues of Michael Kupperman’s comic of the same name—is a three-panel strip featuring the Head, who is what his name suggests: a disembodied head. In the first panel, he declares, “Someday I will rule the world!” In the second, he admits, “But for now, I have been reduced to flipping burgers with my telekinetic powers! Bah!” In the third, he’s on a couch, watching Three’s Company, and muttering, “Bah! Such foolish television!”
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The lurch from comic-book supervillain cliche to boob-tube homage nicely encapsulates Kupperman’s methods and influences. While alt-comics creators try to cadge some credibility by putting on literary airs and their mainstream peers pray for a movie deal, Kupperman has other burgers to flip. On the one hand, he’s steeped in the conventions of comics past—barmy sales pitches (“Men! Is your penis a urine-leaking, chronically unreliable threat to your mental well-being?”), breathless pulp-adventure titles (I Bothered a Big Fish!), and doofy superheroes (e.g., Underpants-on-His-Head Man). But his essential rhythms seem to be borrowed from another medium entirely. The way he turns narratives into advertisements, ends stories with some wacko randomly barging through a window, and abruptly drops gags only to pick them up and drop them again suggests that Kupperman takes his cues from the surreality of the small screen—especially Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its animated heirs on the Cartoon Network.
That bit is an honest-to-God TV parody. It plays with documentary genres, and the jokes are predicated on quick shifts between panels that are deliberately analogous to camera cuts. But many of Kupperman’s pieces go a step further, adapting the style of surreal juxtaposition to the comic-book context through their use of layout and space. A mostly text outer-space adventure is illustrated with random drawings that have nothing to do with the story. An advertisement for 4-Playo 3000, a robot that provides foreplay, takes up most of a page—except for an unobtrusive banner at the bottom that reads, “Let’s All Go to the Bathroom! A message from the Bathroom Council.” As in Chris Ware’s early comics, many pages are designed as a carefully arranged clutter of fake ads, strips, text blocks, and random gags. The result is a clanky, retro tribute to the days when comic books, like TV, constituted a mass art form, and so had more in common with TV’s hucksterism and variety. These days, most comics carry few ads that aren’t for their own publisher.
Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics)
