23 Nov 2008
Cape Town has Bitterkomix, Durban has Mamba, but Gauteng had nothing. That’s until this month when the new comix magazine Zombie was published.
Zombie is the brainchild of visual artist Mark Kannemeyer alias Lorcan White, who gained fame as an absurdist contributor to Bitterkomix, the (in)famous magazine that was launched in 1992 by his brother Anton and Conrad Botes. Highlight was the Uys en Buys series, which could be interpreted as a surreal take on the Kannemeyer family saga.
Zombie isn’t a Gauteng version of Bitterkomix. It’s equally underground, but it’s much less of an ego-thing. While a large part of Bitterkomix is now filled with the autobiographical adventures of Anton Kannemeyer, including huge excerpts from his diaries, Zombie is essentially a compilation of fascinating comic artists who all worked around the idea of creating something experimental and absurd.
“I didn’t want them to outdo Bitterkomix, focusing on sex and religion, but rather push the medium. I didn’t want anything conventional, no association with the mainstream,” says Kannemeyer, who showed potential contributors an issue of the Swiss magazine Strapazin to give them an idea of what he was aiming for.
That was two years ago. Kannemeyer subsequently received money from the National Arts Council and the Open Window School of Visual Communication. And after much begging, pulling and twisting arms, fourteen contributors eventually passed the quality test. Some are young (Jonah Sack), others quite old (Norman Catherine). There are international artists (Rui Tentreiro from Mozambique and Vincent Moderne from France), a black artist (Mr Slippers), two women (Nicolene Louw and 351073) and even a poet (Danie Marais alias N.P. van Lyskou).
The end result is 43 pages of truly absurdist art, with a full colour cover and printed on nice thick paper, with little text and quirky narratives. Some are beautifully crafted, like Corné Zeelie’s minute drawings in Entrails, others are purposefully ugly, like Kannemeyer’s own stories of devastating big city life.
Zombie could almost read like an absurdist manifesto, that has its roots in punk rock and Situationist pranks. Or as Kannemeyer writes in the first page: “Zombie is not art. Zombie is absurd. Zombie is its own underground.”
When I read those words out to him he smiles and says: “When I received all the contributions I found a surreal, absurdist element that I didn’t expect. That turned out to be the link, this surreal experimentation with the narratives, relying very much on the visual to carry the story.”
Zombie isn’t Beano or Superhero. It’s much more in line with the underground comics that developed in America in the early seventies, when the medium broke away from the focus on kids and took on a serious rock ‘n roll attitude. ‘Comics’ became ‘komix’ and people like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman became guiding lights.
But essentially Zombie is a reflection of Kannemeyer himself. He’s the curator, the ultimate outsider artist, living a somewhat reclusive life in a gothic old house in Pretoria, where his gigantic collection of books, comics and records leaves visitors gawking. Consequently he’s a connoisseur of anything vaguely underground, something he likes to illustrate by regularly referring to the canon of outcast artists and musicians.
“One of my favourites is Gary Panther,” he’ll say. And when you raise your eyebrows he’ll explain: “He drew for Raw and had character called Jimbo. Panther was the first real punk cartoonist. You can see by looking at the drawings that this guy is listening to destructo type of punk music, and you can also see his work on a lot of record covers at the time.”
Kannemeyer's own work in Zombie follows exactly that tradition. It stems from a long line of underground art and encompasses the bleak worldview of many punk rock artists. Kannemeyer has outgrown the Bitterkomix obsession with pornography and the Afrikaans patriarchy of father, teacher, korporaal and dominee. Subsequently he has developed into a true artist who translates his obsessions and neuroses into drawings that balance between extremely well crafted and deliberate repugnance. His is a post-apocalyptic world inhabited my monsters, seasick landscapes, square headed dogs and faceless people. “Some of it is deliberately ugly, discordant and false. Because the story I’m telling is so ugly I had to make the art ugly, I had to find a medium for telling that story,” he explains.
Zombie comes in a limited edition of 500 numbered copies and an additional ten with an ‘art cover’ of Fabriano cotton, signed by some of the contributors. “Most people who like comics won’t like this. This is more for art students and collectors. It’s not titillating, it’s much more complex. Is it art? I don’t know. With art I immediately think of conceptual art. And this is not. It’s a craft,” says Kannemeyer, who also has a solo exhibition of his off-kilter, dehumanised landscape drawings at Art on Paper, which runs until the 29th of November.
Zombie is available from Art on Paper, 44 Stanley and can be ordered from Mark Kannemeyer zombiecomix@gmail.com. The normal copy costs R75, the special art edition R200