TELEVISION #1 by Ryan Alexander-Tanner
© OHYESVERYNICE Comics
Mania Grade: A-
Issue: 1
Author: Ryan Alexander-Tanner
Publisher: OHYESVERYNICE Comics
Price: $3.00
Issue: 1
Author: Ryan Alexander-Tanner
Publisher: OHYESVERYNICE Comics
Price: $3.00
TELEVISION #1
By: Kurt AmackerDate: Thursday, November 15, 2007
Ryan Alexander-Tanner’s Xeric-winning one-shot, Television, serves as a clever and, I think, intentionally-asinine simulation of channel surfing. He begins with a man with a television for a head, who expounds upon the medium as if its worst excesses haven’t already come to pass. He talks about a coming day when “our private jokes are shared with the masses and our intimate dialogue has been diluted by the tide of pop culture!” This has, of course, already occurred in the real world. Alexander-Tanner then interweaves the story of John the Baptist (replaced with James Brown) with a cliché love story about a couple on a bridge, a gangsta-pimp version of Dracula, and an interview with Brian “Kato” Kaelin – in comic form, of course. He returns to the James-Brown-as-John-the-Baptist story a couple of more times before concluding the issue.
I think Television deliberately simulates the act of channel surfing from one cheap, perverted experience to the next. We see a cute-but-meaningless twist on a significant Biblical narrative, a cheesy love story that could easily star Meg Ryan or Reese Witherspoon, a gangsta rap update of a classic character that bears no resemblance to the original text – in this case, Dracula – and an interview with a celebrity, by all rights, shouldn’t be one. It feels like scanning through cable channels in the middle of the night, only to return to the same rubbish again and again – in this case, the James Brown story. Yes, I realize there are quite a few things worth watching on television, but the garbage-to-gold ratio remains disturbingly high. Alexander-Tanner’s comic brings that experience to the comic form, with one excruciating vignette after another. But, instead of the lazy storytelling and bad writing washing over you like an audio-visual acid bath, you experience it word-for-word. It may strike some readers as a straw man argument of sorts, but it seems accurate enough to me.
Alexander-Tanner’s art style changes from story to story, from the patently cartoonish in the James Brown story and The Adventures of Spectacula Dracula to slightly more realistic in That One Song From the 1960s – the romance – and the interview with Kaelin. Appropriately enough, he renders the more outlandish stories in less realistic art, with the more plausible scenarios – and, in the interview, a real scenario – drawn with greater detail. It’s a good-looking comic, and one that proves Alexander-Tanner’s versatility as an artist.
Television is a one-shot. You can pick it up in stores in January or at the website for OHYESVERYNICE COMICS. Note that the actual cover doesn’t look like the thumbnail in this review. It’s just purple with the title in green letters across it. Regardless, look for it.
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