What is BRUSH WITH PERIL??

1500 famous works of art created by 150 of history’s greatest artists displayed in 220 museums around the world… now a 400 page graphic novel about SPIES!

Have you ever been to a museum and found yourself transfixed by the image before you? Maybe, for just a moment, it feels as if time itself and the space around you no longer exist as you experience, face to face, this image before you? As if perhaps THIS is a momentary glimpse at the sublime?

Well nothing of the sort has ever personally happened to me!  I can’t stand museums!  I can’t think of anything more exhausting or skin-crawlingly unpleasant, being on my feet for SO LONG, surrounded by a sweaty, smelly, overwhelming, smothering mass of poorly dressed, stupid, pretentious breed of humanity who all think they’re so smart and so much better than me… just walking and WALKING along en masse; one dull, incomprehensible image after another on the walls like a sick fever dream and will we ever reach the end of this abysmal space, or the wretched crowds of inescapable, fumbling and plodding , pontificating flesh!

Well SOME people say they are swept up by all this alleged “art”!  That they’re carried off, far far away, into the realms of stories these images must contain,  with each image like an entryway into a whole new and distinct world unto itself, and yet relatable to aspects of their own lives! Their minds reacting and interacting, finding themselves affected with raw emotions, intellectual curiosity, or “big ideas”! They’ll claim the works summon up memories, or smells or tastes, or the feel of textures against their skin! (Maybe they do – but I certainly don’t have time or patience to stare indefinitely and wait for that sort of thing!)

Yes, so they say, SOME PEOPLE might begin to ponder, Who ARE these distinct, interesting, beautiful people in all these exquisite paintings?  Where are these lovely, fascinating, unique places?  The answers to these questions can be interesting and surprising, and “Brush With Peril: A Full-Length Agent Ian Anger Novel of Low Brow Intrigue and High Brow Art” will answer these very questions, fans… with definitivity! 

They’re SPIES!  Who wear masks!

In this art-referential treasure-trove of thrills and melodrama, you will gape in awe, as we rudely throw all of art history’s reverential centuries of imagery and bold concepts – out the “high brow” window, and all your favorite famous works of art become LESS BORING BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES! … suave heroes, ominous villains, or striking settings in our SUSPENSEFUL tale of ACTION, INTRIGUE, MYSTERY, THRILLS, ROMANCE, EXOTIC LOCATIONS, FANCY VEHICLES, FLASHY WEAPONS, FIGHTING, and DEBONAIRE STUNNING SPIES! 

Face it, fans! MOST PEOPLE know, museum art is dull and monotonous… UNTIL NOW!  

Rob Oder
Editor-in-Chief
Tabloia Weekly Magazine
Proud Publisher of “Brush With Peril: A Full-Length Agent Ian Anger Novel of Low Brow Intrigue and High Brow Art”

I think I did my best to sum up my feelings about this project when I wrote an impassioned letter to a UC Davis professor I’d taken a few classes from, Wayne Thiebaud, which I encourage you to read HERE.

Below is how I (similarly) tried to summarize Brush with Peril to my Publisher:

I was fortunate to take two classes from Wayne Thiebaud when I got my degree in art from U.C. Davis.  He taught how great works of art create a story within them.  Who is this person in the portrait?  Where is this place and what is happening there?  If we slow down and let the images absorb us, they create so much in their stillness, inside our heads.  It causes us to see the world differently, through the eyes of that artist. 

After we’ve looked at a Van Gogh painting, we begin to see those swirls when we look in the sky.  When we reach for fruit on a table, Cezanne’s compositions and colors superimpose themselves on our reality.  But our own perspective also changes the art’s meaning; we infuse and constantly redefine it with our own experience. 

Inserting famous art into a comic book format juxtaposes the well-known, static images – usually viewed in galleries, in isolation, frozen – into new contexts in which to view them, embedding fresh stories into the images, as well as re-interpreting them to serve new roles in telling these new stories.  As John Berger showed in his “Ways of Seeing,” if a Rothko is ten feet tall on a museum wall, you will read it differently than if it is two inches tall on your bathroom mirror next to a can of deodorant.  Or as Hitchcock points out, if you film an old man smiling, followed by an image of a cute toddler, it “reads” differently than the smile followed by a woman in the bath.  The selection and ordering causes the traditional art to become fresh and contain new meanings, constantly reinvented by new lenses through which to experience them.

Brush with Peril is a two part (roughly 400 pages per part), espionage-style graphic novel in which the characters and settings are famous museum masterworks turned into masked spies and villains.  Part One combines and re-interprets 1500 images of 150 artists represented in 220 museums, into one narrative story. High brow art meets low brow pop culture – a round peg forced into the square hole of Mexican standoffs, fist fights, and car chases.  The juxtapositions create a dialogue about the meanings and status of art, and our perceptions of it as a culture.

 

American Realist Sculptors are getting murdered across the nation! Agent Ian Anger is sent around the globe to find out why, with only his wits, his tuxedo, and ski mask – and armed with automatics and his fists, all manner of exciting vehicles on land and air, and teaming up along the way with various colorful fellow masked agents who make up the Global Agency of Protection. 

The search leads to masked politicians, masked religious leaders, masked menacing thugs, masked football players, masked kick-boxing ballerina dancers, masked girlfriends of masked celebrity artists, masked scientists, masked assassins (to protect their identities), and mechanical sea monsters who don’t wear masks because they’re robots, as well as gunfire, karate chopping and kicking and punching, car chases, air and boat warfare, illicit gambling with heavy stakes (Name the Bean!), healthy pseudo-intellectual expostulations on art appreciation and critical analysis; and all of it embroiling Agent Anger in a political plot of vanity, villainy, art theory, and destruction. 

WHAT IS ART?  What has art to do with the thin but intensely problematic plotline, and why is so much art so heavily referenced?  Who has the right to create, analyze, judge, or censor art??  Is the fate of the nation at stake???  Join Ian Anger and the Global Agency of Protection, for the fate of high art, pop culture, and trash media may depend on it!

Hello, fans!  I’m Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief of Tabloia Weekly Magazine and proud publisher of “Brush With Peril: A Full-Length Agent Ian Anger Novel of Low Brow Intrigue and High Brow Art!”  I’m here to help make your reading of this comic as enjoyable and free of stress and confusion as possible!  For that reason, I’ve been asked to handle this page of FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS!   Before writing in, make sure we haven’t already posted an answer to your question in this helpful “FAQ”, below!

IMPORTANT NOTE: BEFORE LOOKING FOR ANSWERS HERE IN THIS “FAQ” BELOW… it may be wise to FIRST look in other, more well-informed tabs, such as ANY of the other tabs besides this one!  Good luck!
-Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief!

Q: What the &%$#!?  am I reading?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  You are reading Brush With Peril: A Full-Length Agent Ian Anger Novel of Low Brow Intrigue and High Brow Art!  You can read some different takes on the question in the tabs above, or Wayne Thiebaud summed it up HERE!

Q:  Why is everyone in this comic wearing masks? 

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Actually, not everyone DOES wear masks!  Only SPIES! And VILLAINS!   It’s common knowledge and pretty evident if you just look around yourself while you’re in a grocery store or on the bleachers at a sporting event, that regular everyday people DON’T wear masks!  This just goes to show what a soberingly realistic portrayal this comic is of the world of intrigue, where, just like in real, everyday life, only spies and villains wear masks… walking among us, unbeknownst to us since they’re in disguise!

Q: What is an FAQ?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  “FAQ” is an acronym!

Q: Isn’t a lot of imagery in this comic blatantly stolen from famous works of art?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief: Yes, flagrantly!  I don’t know how even someone with no interest in or knowledge of art couldn’t notice!

Q: Not everyone who is a spy or villain is wearing a mask in your comic.  Some everyday people such as bartenders, menial workers, waitresses, landlords, and just general people standing around, are all wearing masks!  How do you account for this, based on your statement that only spies and villains wear masks?

 Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Well, just like in real life, there are some professions that are more likely to elicit a need or desire to wear a mask, such as the ones you named!  For example, waitresses don’t want annoying drunk men to be harassing them for their phone numbers or addresses or following them home after work, so it stands to reason that waitresses frequently wear masks during their business hours!  Likewise with landlords, who can unexpectedly and without proper provocation make accidental enemies of bad tenants who feel slighted when their landlords are actually asking perfectly reasonable requests such as for the tenant to not play jazz records on full volume at two in the morning, or to pay their rent please when it’s two months late!

Q: Why do some characters have masks on the splash pages and cover images, and then when you see them in the comic book stories, they’re no longer wearing masks?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Because, just like in real life, posing for a cover image or splash page is a big deal, and often even the most modest people take it seriously and want to look their best for the cover shot!  Anyone can have a bad hair day, but a cover image will last forever, so they get all gussied up in their nicest masks!

Q: What is an acronym?  And I still don’t understand what “FAQ” means.

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief: An acronym is when something from a specific time period appears in a completely different period of time, and stands out as not belonging!  Additionally, the letters “F”, “A”, and “Q” are appropriated from the first letters of other words to create the “FAQ”; for example “Q” is the first letter of the word, “question”!  “FA” is kind of dirty, and that’s why we only say the first letters of those words!  It should say “F-ing A Question!”  As in, “I’ve got an F-ing A Question!” Or, “What the FAQ, F-ing A question??!”

Q: Why, throughout this story, are there a bunch of arrows pointing at parts of the pictures?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Arrows point out subtle and important clues that a non-spy such as yourself might miss!

Q: Why do all the arrows have exclamation points inside them?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Obviously, because exclamation points are exciting (!!!), and if you use them to point something out, it helps readers such as yourself realize how exciting these small details are that you might have missed if you’re not a spy and there aren’t giant arrows with exclamation points pointing at them!

Q: Why do all the bad guys have conservative political and religious values, and you label them as idiots and evil and “villainy,” and all the good guys are artists and liberals, and they’re all smart and talented and “cool”?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  That isn’t the case at all!  It just turns out that the first villains you meet, and this is the only people you meet for the first six pages at that!, are an evil former Republican President who everyone thinks is an idiot, his snake-like vicious conservative Vice President, and an opinionated fundamentalist religious leader who is bent on amending our nation’s laws to conform to his narrow and judgmental definitions of right and wrong!  But stick with our story for a while, and you’ll see that we’ll rake the barbs over everybody, thick and thin!  If you read past the first chapter, there is a stupendously villainous far-to-the-left artist, whom you might even say is the arch-villain of the whole story!  And everyone knows that government workers and law enforcement officers (which by definition includes spies!) lean conservative, so why would you assume that the heroes are all liberal?  And perhaps the heroes aren’t so heroic as you might think!  We’re all just human beings, doing the best we can to justify our actions!  There are many subtle shades of villainy!  And truth and justice, right and wrong, conservative and liberal, may not play out in all the ways you expect!  What is villainy, and what is “good”?  And above all, what is “art”!?

Q: I don’t think you answered my question…

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  And indeed, what for that matter is God?, depending on who you ask?  We don’t plan to answer any questions of religion in this particular thought-provoking tale! 

Q:  Why is there so much racism, sexism and homophobia throughout this story?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Because as we have seen all around us, art-referencing comic books about spies must necessarily be referential to art history (which is rife with such views), and symptomatic of the culture we live in (which is rife with such views)!  Art is a mirror of what it sees!  And just because it reflects back at us unpleasant topics such as the ones you named, it doesn’t mean we agree with or endorse such views!  Also, I think the creator and artist of this story is a racist and sexist AND homophobic, despicable human being…

Q: I’ve seen some of the originals of some of these paintings portrayed in this comic, and the originals hanging in the museums don’t have all these masks!

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  That isn’t a question, it’s a statement!  I already explained that the “Q” in “FAQ” stands for “question, remember?”  Let’s move on!

Q: I’ve seen some of the originals of some of these paintings portrayed in this comic, and the originals are WAY better than these sad pathetic drawings in the comic.

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief: Yes, truly, these sad pathetic drawings in this comic pale in comparison to the originals. Clear sign of a forgettably mediocre artist. But that also wasn’t a question.

Q: Why do all the panels have weird, hand-written scribbly borders instead of clean rectangular ones, and sometimes the borders don’t even go all the way around the panels, or there aren’t any borders?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Sloppy craftsmanship!  Lack of artistic straight-line skills!  It’s as if the artist doesn’t care! Please see the non-question before this one!

Q: Why is the lettering so sloppy?  And the voice bubbles are sloppy and imprecise, and sometimes don’t even go all the way around the words?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Because the artist wrote it himself, right on the page, and comics nowadays don’t ruin their pages with that shoddy dated technique any more!  Nowadays, artists who aren’t so poor and take ten minutes to learn Illustrator can afford to do it on a computer instead!

Q: Why bother to try re-drawing all these masterworks, when the originals are all so much better?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Context, amigo!  Context!

Q: Studying the panels in this comic and the actual museum masterworks side by side, in comparison, really reveals the ineptitude of this comic book artist.  Wouldn’t it be a better use of time trying to draw something unique and new instead of just poorly copying what’s already been done?  Or just to not draw anything at all any more, and get a job as a busboy, for example?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Yes!  Absolutely yes, exactly! There is nothing new to be gained from just copying a bunch of old paintings!  It shows a real lack of creativity!  And also, I appreciate that you readers are so single-minded and bound to keep pointing out that this artist really is NOT A GOOD ARTIST!

Q: Is this stealing, to blatantly copy all these famous works of art?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Well, YEAH, it sure seems to ME it is! 

Q: In the commentary section, I read that the artist talks about how he traced all this art that he drew.  Doesn’t that mean the artist doesn’t know how to draw and he’s no good at making art?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Yes, that’s absolutely right!  If you trace your drawings, then you can’t draw and you’re not an artist.  You’re a hack!  And that goes for any and every circumstance or excuse an artist can think of!  They’re pathetic and detestable and pitiable failures if they trace!  No exceptions, end of story! 

Q: Is this art?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  As Andy Warhol said, “What is art?  It’s a man’s name.”  So in that sense, this isn’t art!  Art is the man who DESIGNED this fabulous website (literally! At least, in its early stages!), but “Art” is NOT the website itself, or the art contained within!

Q: It seems like there are just pages and pages of boring dialogue, with nothing happening.  Isn’t this supposed to be an exciting spy story?

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief:  Well, it’s SUPPOSED to not be a boring piece of …I MEAN… No!  This is a realistic, true to life spy story, which means it NEEDS to be boring!  Not a popular, exciting fake spy story like your average entertainment media!  Real life spies actually spend long periods of time sitting or walking and reading and typing and filing paperwork and asking questions, waiting, contemplating, AND LOOKING AND OBSERVING!  When a real life spy wearing a mask actually needs to use her or his fancy vehicles or weapons, it’s that much more exciting compared to their otherwise dull, dour jobs!

Q: But why does this story have to be so slow?  Nothing happens for pages at a time.

Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief: Because as anyone knows who’s gone to a museum, for something to be art, it has to be dull and boring, am I right?!

People get enjoyment out of different things.  Some people just like an entertaining story.  Some people seem satisfied with less than that.  If I watch a film or read a book and the story resonates with me (and even sometimes if it doesn’t but there’s something there that intrigues or moves or unsettles or confuses me), I often enjoy hunting down interviews of those involved about that work, or finding their other work, or hearing analyzations by fans, reviews by critics, critical analyses by scholars, and any other hints and insights I can get regarding what the work means to creators or audience, where the stories came from, and why these stories. 

If you are like me, then I hope you will enjoy hearing my one way dialogue to you.  I am of the school that if you understand the artist you can better understand and appreciate their work.  In this “COMMENTARY” section, I will share how I came up with this work, all the influences that funneled into it and shaped its creation and evolution, themes and story ideas within it, my writing process, my intellectual (pseudo-intellectual) thoughts on what this story means, how things evolved as I began producing it, my various attempts at publicizing it to build an audience, how and why others got involved in its production and distribution, and even some script samples, as well as my processes in physically creating the artwork, unused images, (a very few) sketches, changes in layouts, difficulties and disappointments, and whatever else comes to mind along the way.

 If you are like many readers of comics who don’t give a SH!%&T about any of this kind of ego-stroking pompous self-congratulatory time-wasting highfalutin ’ foofy-fa  bullsh!%&t, then it should be quite simple for you to just ignore it by NOT clicking this “commentary” button, or watching the “videos” which cover the same material.  But if something in the story confuses you, or interests you, feel free to click over to those on occasion, and I look forward to sharing.  Let’s begin, shall we?

-Chris

Back in the 1960’s, the famous Pop Artist, Roy Lichtenstein, decided that comics deserve to be elevated from a status of low-brow, shoddy, pathetic, vacuous, dumbed-down-to-the-level of-stupid-children/narrative/throw-away/shlock imagery, to “high art!”  He purposefully and unapologetically swiped the  &%!!*$% out of struggling, hard working, denigrated, ashamed-of-their-profession, barely-paid-enough-to-support-their-families comics artists’ work by tracing their blood-sweat-and-tears visual creations – often with less artistic skill than the originals – onto his own canvases, then signing his own name to them and putting them up on the walls of galleries and museums, thereby defining them as “high art NOT schlock,” and selling them for a fortune, and not sharing a penny of his earnings with or even mentioning the names of the starving, hard-working illustrators whose images he “appropriated”, “re-interpreted,” and  “elevated”!

Please don’t get me wrong – Although I’m hyperbolic and sarcastic here, I feel very strongly that this conept of Lichtenstein’s was brilliant, thought-provoking, transformative, legally acceptable in its use of a copyrighted artwork, and duly deserving of his accolades, fame, and success. AND I feel he could have given some credit, and that would have been a polite, honorable thing to do, as opposed to just disparaging his source material.

In keeping with Lichtenstein’s ethos, I have conceived my comic book project, A Brush with Peril, in part to return the favor of this lavish and respectable artistic history, and “appropriate”, “re-interpret,” and “(de-)elevate” the status of museum art by altering its meaning and significance, cramming it from a carefully framed and curated, precious and individual piece into an ill-fitting, awkward, but complete and narrative storyline, and sucking it screaming and resisting into the pulped, four-color (or in this case, two-color, or no-color, or “black-and-white”) pages of (in my opinion) perhaps the finest, most narrative, and most personal artistic media in existence… the comic book!  What goes around must eventually come around, Roy and the art world, and for ideas such as these we are indebted to YOU!

If you have found yourself spending some time at this site, if you felt it deserves some merit, if you’re impressed with the ideas and ingenuity and time involved in producing it, or if you have just generally received any enjoyment from it, then perhaps you would like to show your encouragement and support by signing up to contribute a dollar (or more) a month, and receive some unique and fun perks in exchange, at my Patreon.com/ChrisWisniaArts.

The history of the artist is one of dependency upon those with the money to fund the creation of our work.  Unless we were born or married into the class of the idle rich, we artists would be penniless and living in gutters, starving and in tattered clothes… without YOU.  (That is, even MORE penniless and tattered.) 

We need supporters like Paul Durand-Ruel, who single-handedly provided Monet and the Impressionists with money for paints or canvas or food or a roof over their heads.  Durand-Ruel decided that their work deserved to be supported, and he purchased over 1000 Monets, 1500 Renoirs, 800 Pissarros, 400 Sisleys, 400 Cassatts, and 200 Manets, to allow them to subsist without having to put their time into day jobs, so that they could dedicate eight, twelve hours a day creating their art.  He basically encouraged, nurtured, and financed the entire impressionist movement.

Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie was created because a patron commissioned him. 

Michelangelo could never have painted the masterpiece that adorns the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling – a four year endeavor – without Pope Julius II’s funds. 

Art is funded by those with the means and belief in the artist or work they support. It is my hope that this (or my other projects) manage to give you some fun, laughs, excitement, entertainment, intimacy, time for reflection, stimulation, food for thought, or whatever else you have experienced here.

The history of ART is at stake!  And I am grateful if you care to support that cause, in any capacity that is comfortable to you! Pleae feel free to take a peek at my Patreon.com/ChrisWisniaArts and see what rewards you can earn in return for your kind patreonage.

Thank you, sincerely, for your consideration.
Chris Wisnia

Chris Wisnia was born on Friday the 13th!  He published his first comic, “Tabloia Weekly Magazine #572” in 2004, and has continued writing and drawing comics ever since, every spare moment he’s able to find – to the disdain and exasperation of alienated family and friends.  Fame, critical acclaim, wealth, and respect have eluded him ever since! He also produces Diary of a Struggling Comics Artist, a documentary about the everyday struggles that YOUR FAVORITE comic book creators face, trying to get into and remain a part of the industry. Chris lives in Sunny Davis, California, with his unwearied wife, two unmanageable sons, an ill-mannered dog and a second, easily terrified and quick-to-snap smaller dog.  He has had many aliases and codenames, including Wiz, Lil’ Whizzer, Wuss-nia, The Humiliator, and Chrissy-Pissy-Wissy-Wussy-Pussy. To protect his identity while grocery shopping or socializing at the local bath, he prefers luchador masks to domino masks.

Rob Oder is a fictitious editor who has helmed Tabloia Weekly Magazine’s most popular features since the late silver/early bronze age of weekly tabloid non-fiction comic books!  His name has been attached to such classics in the genre as Shocking True Stories of the Bible, The Lump (or The Moe Beckett Head Transplanting Massacres), Doris Danger Giant Monster Adventures, Dick Hammer: Conservative Republican Private Investigator, Dr. DeBunko: Debunker of the Supernatural, and The Spider Twins Encyclopedia of Wholly Believable Real Life Masked Vigilantes!  He has not died, because he isn’t a real person, and he intends to edit a whole lot more of Tabloia’s up-and-coming sure-to-be-classics, including THIS one – A Brush with Peril!