Sunday, September 18, 2011

Back and forth with Ksinnin (Furioso)



I'm thrilled to have been talking to Ksinnin on an earlier post and thought the back and forth should get it's own post.

Hey, thanks. I'm quite flattered. I am not a pro or a graphic designer. My lack of training must show! But I've always wondered why most superhero comix did not exploit more the narrative toolbox available.

Furioso was the nick used at the SHC site when I sent them stuff looking for paid work, but I didn't measure up, so they put it up as "guest" work. The name is an inside double pun on the poem by Ludovico Ariosto and a famous cartoon character,

I then went by Ksennin, a shortening of Kame Sennin, or Turtle Hermit, the Dragonball character who was a dirty old man. For some obscure reason it seemed fitting.

I did tons of artwork and comix since the early 90s and wrote some lengthy/complex plot-based fics and essays on the genre of superheroine porn and its axiological connotations, but I took all I could off the web when I saw it was being reposted in very fragmented and de-contextualised ways which emphasied the embarrassing misogynistic aspects I had instead tried (badly) to de-construct. Tellingly, only the most extremist fetish material is still being reposted.
Slid said...
First of all, the notion that you are not a designer or pro in the field, yet can do work of this quality is flabbergasting. Your story telling is extremely well thought out and is totally effective. Sex is most often depicted in comics in a way that just sits on the page and does nothing for the reader at all. You avoid this problem entirely with your multitude of word balloons and panel inserts that evokes a passage of emotions and action over a length of time that effectively transcends the medium. That to me is what's so cool about your work.

It sounds like a you have generated such a volume of work that you have taught yourself a tremendous amount by racking up a ton of experience. You work in a simple style that makes doing a lot of work more practical. the simplicity also strips things down to the economical essence which is a much more effective way to tell stories and is not something you see much of in comics at all these days. Alex Toth, as an example, was a master of this kind of distillation. You've succeeded at this as well.

Me, I wouldn't worry about what my audience does with my work. To me this would seem too self conscious since I feel that doing the work is the important thing. You may differ and that's fine. That's just where I come from. The vast sweep of humans have a large variety of sexual interests that can become very individualized. I don't try to second guess this. What may seem to be mysogynistic may not be anything operational in the person viewing the work beyond the realm of sexual fantasy. I feel a person's particular sexual interests are more just an artifact of the process of growing up. Who knows where a particular kink or fetish comes from? So I don't spend a lot of time worrying about how this stuff gets used by others since everyone has such a particular set of interests and likes and interpretations. That and the porn audience is a silent audience, by and large. You can't know what's going on out there, there's no way.

I guess I'm urging you to put the stuff the heck back up!!!! There are us fans out here that will grok where you're going with this too, y'know?

3 comments:

  1. Wow, thanks for sharing that . As a "hack " artist I cannot tell you how wonderful that was to read.I myself didn't measure up. I am truly impressed with your writing as well Slid.

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  2. The simplified drawing style was indeed intended to allow for faster drawing and be able to finish comic sequences since in my early days I did far more detailed drawings and the scenes stagnated after a few pages once my interest (ahem) wandered.

    The sequential style indeed is intended to convey faster and more elaborate action, as well as to provide narrative effects thru the changes in panel size and proportion, something I caught from watching the work of Perez in the 80s. Modern comics really decompress action too much for the sake of big, over-rendered pages, which reasult in slowed and unsatisfying pacing. Also, the sex scenes should not be gratituous but should rather be used as ways to illustrate characterization or create emotional as well as
    physical tension and thus advance the plot. Even if you take a couple of pages in isolation it should be clear there is a progression going on, not just a checklist of positions being taken care of.

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  3. As to my concerns about reception, basically I had specific ideas about the nature of erotica and how sexual concerns can work within the superhero that I wanted to discuss openly and work out dialectically. Since I had nearly no one with whom to have some discussions so I took it online so it was more a form of open communication. I felt sex did not have to be gratuitous but could be an integral part of the story, I felt superhero scenarios allowed expanded areas of development to sexual ideas that would be unworkable in less fantastic genres. I also saw that online porn tended to polarize into plot-based love-dovey slash fiction, or hardcore, plot-what-plot? simplistic abuse scenarios, and wondered why so little material explored the vast gap between the two extremes.
    Also, I could not but reflect on the nature of my own unusual interests, and I used my stories and artwork to explore, deconstruct and defuse my personal fetishes, and touch upon the larger themes of erotica and genre potential.
    The problem is that because it all depended on
    narrative context, when the artwork was reposted
    as isolated pages the themes and effects I was trying to bring to notice and to create discourse about, were then lost and it just became more of what I originally tried to work against.
    So yeah, having agendas online is not very productive.

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