People Will Say : 'Monkeys Can Do Paintings.' Well, They Can’t Really.

Welcome to The Planet of The Apes

"You don't invent Technology and then decide what to do with it - 

You come up with An Artistic Problem, 

and then  

You have to invent the technology in order to accomplish it.

So, it is the opposite to what everyone thinks it is, and any Artist will tell you that.

And Art  

- on ALL levels - 

is just Technology.

Which why - 

People will say 'Monkeys can do paintings' 

Well, they can't, really.

They can do scribbling, they can do, like my 2 year old does 

- but if you Want to Say 

' I want to convey an emotion, to another Human Being',

 that's something only Human  Beings can do.

Animals can do it by roaring in your face or biting your hand off (that usually has an effect). 

But to do it in A Painting; to do it in A Play, or A Story, in Poetry - or anything that's in The Arts - you have to be a Human Being.

The Patron creates The Propaganda - and what I wanted to do was go back to some of the Older Propaganda, which was consistant through ALL of The Societies, Mythology -

Which is to say, 

"What Do They ALL Believe..?"

Because all of this propaganda was created INDEPENDENTLY.

And what are these things which they ALL believe,  which is, Relationships with your Father, Relationships with your Society, Relationships with Your History, Relationships with The Gods - all of this stuff, it's old, but there were psychological motiffs that were created, through storytelling, primarily ORAL storytelling, that explained WHAT they believed in and WHO they believed in.

So what I wanted to do was go back and find the psychological motiffs that underlie that - those grow out of Popularism.

And to say that - not all - but a majority of people, BOYS, have a certain psychological relationship with Their Father -

And that's been going on through History, and trying to explain that to say : 

"We Know Your DARKEST SECRET. And Therefore, You're Part of US.

Because We All Know The SAME THINGS  - 

We Know What You're Thinking About Your Mother; 

We Know What You Think About Your Bother; 

We Know What You Think  About Your Father REALLY -"

“IT IS NOT TOO FAR-FETCHED TO PREDICT THAT SOME DAY OUR VERY OWN PLANET MAY BE PEOPLED ENTIRELY BY SUPERMEN!” — Joe Shuster assured us back in 1938, but comic-book reality predicts developments in our own in many other ways.

  What we construct in our imaginations, we have a knack of building or discovering. We may not have flying men or invulnerable women racing among us, but we now have access to supertechnologies that once existed only in comic-book stories.

  “Mother Boxes,” empathic personal computers like the ones in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World story cycle, are already here in embryonic form. Is the soothing contact offered by the Mother Box so different from the instant connection that a cell phone provides? Twenty-four-hour access to friends, family, and the buzz of constant social exchange can make us feel cocooned and safe in a reportedly hostile world. 

In many cases, Mother herself can be summoned on the Box.

  Metron was Kirby’s avatar of ruthless, questing intellect, whose Mobius Chair twisted through time and space to make him the god of couch potatoes, surfing channels, gathering information, without ever leaving the comfort of his armchair. Metron’s magic furniture seems less a wonder of supertechnology than a fact of daily life. As Kirby tried to tell us in his book of the same name, we are the new gods, just as we are the old ones, too.

  There is already technology that allows people to drive remote-controlled cars with their minds. What’s to stop someone becoming Auto-Man, the Human Car? Secretly, he sits in his room, munching Maltesers at his computer screen, while he listlessly pilots his incredible RV supercar around town to save lives and fight the crime that ordinary police cars just aren’t fast enough to handle.

  In so many ways, we’re already superhuman. Being extraordinary is so much a part of our heritage as human beings that we often overlook what we’ve done and how very unique it all is. We have made machines to extend our physical reach and the reach of our senses, allowing us to peer into the depths of space and outer time. Our cameras and receivers allow us to see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We can slow down, freeze, and accelerate time on our screens. We can study and manipulate microscopic worlds, print our names on single atoms, analyze soil on Mars, and observe the rings of Saturn at close range. Our voices and our photographic records of everything we’ve seen are carried at the speed of light on an expanding bubble of radio, into the infinite. Television broadcasts of the first moon landing are still traveling, growing fainter as the waves spread out. If you had a powerful enough receiver and a TV on a planet forty light-years from here, you could watch Neil Armstrong take his first step on mankind’s behalf and hear our silly, hopeful summer 1969 songs.

  Our space machines are the remote physical tendrils of our species launched across gulfs of nothing to land on other worlds or to travel, gathering data until the signal fades, or until there’s no one left to listen. These ultimate extensions of human senses thread our awareness into the absolute freezing dark 10.518 billion miles from where you’re sitting. As I write, that’s how far Voyager 1, humanity’s farthest-reaching finger, has extended. Launched in 1977, it remains connected to its home world by radio and by the silver thread of its passage through time from launchpad to interstellar void. Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that’s so big we forget it’s there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to fish. We are cells in the body of a singular three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.

  The superheroes may have their greatest value in a future where real superhuman beings are searching for role models. When the superhumans of tomorrow step dripping from their tanks, they could do much worse than to look to Superman for guidance. Superhero comics may yet find a purpose all along as the social realist fiction of tomorrow.

  Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.

  To find out what higher dimensions might look like, all we have to do is study the relationship between our 3-D world and the 2-D comics. A 4-D creature could look “down” on us through our walls, our clothes, even our skeletons. Our world would be a Cubist X-ray, and perhaps even our thoughts might be laid bare to their gaze.

  As comics readers gazing down from a higher dimension perpendicular to the page surface, we can actually peer inside characters’ thoughts with balloons or captions that provide running commentary. We can also control time in a comics universe. We can stop on page 12 and look back to page 5 to check a story point we missed. The characters themselves continue to act out their own dramas in the same linear sequence, oblivious to our shifting perspective. 

They can go back in time only with the help of supermachines, like the Flash’s cosmic treadmill, but we can look at 1938 Superman next to 1999 Superman without colliding the two stories anywhere but in our heads.