Picking Fights

That Squanto post is coming - I'm trying to tie it with a few other recent shows... which might take some time. Hopefully, I'll have something up before her Thanksgiving show at MINT.

(the following photos are courtesy of Ghostmap Microwave, who got them from Youngblood Gallery)

In his post on Samuel Parker's show, Jeremy describes a detail from Preemptive Strike:

Parker made an interesting choice here: the quotation is given by a fighter pilot. The plane, which certainly appears American, is decorated with Nazi swastikas and armed with the latest in weapons technology: arrows. Yes - as in "Squanto shoots arrows at the white man" sort of arrows.

Jeremy goes on to speculate that the aircraft may be an homage to Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam!:


As I've frequently pointed out, Jeremy is a nigh-illiterate cretin with minimal understandings of aircraft design, the artistic process, the history of comic art, or personal hygiene. Lichtenstein's plane was obviously modeled after the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, while Parker's plane was modeled after the F-14 Tomcat (retired from the US airforce in 2006, the plane is Iran's primary fighter jet).

Of course, the F-14 was most famously depicted in Bill Watterson's January 1, 1995 comic strip:


This strip (the first after Watterson's second, final, sabbatical) was a return to Watterson's trademark style - space hungry, vividly colored boxes with minimal text - the sort of thing comics-page editors hated, and comics-page readers loved.

For more of that sort of thing, check out Samuel Parker's "The Road to Excess," sometime between now and its closing this Saturday.

Also, Derek Weisberg and Crystal Morey have posted a few photos from their upcoming Youngblood exhibit:


View the full flickr set here.