Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comic books, hopeless, HRL, indie Comics, kickstarter, onur bole, oytun yilmaz, post-modern, satire, surrealist

Hopeless: Surreal and Post-Modernist Satire for the Comic Lover

Oyton Yilmaz writes:

We are two young artists from Turkey who just launched our debut comic book project Hopeless on Kickstarter. It is the first issue of an upcoming series about an everyman in search of his soul across a world inhabited by animals. The first issue is complete in 88 color pages and contains the first two episodes of the story. I am the illustrator and co-creator of the project with my writer friend Onur Böle. We also have an art director living in the USA, who supervises the project.

"Why an ordinary protagonist, and why animals?" you might ask. Before getting into that, I should give you a few words as to why I initiated a work of fiction while there are many comic books out there. Our project was born of a crisis — a crisis of sociopolitical oppression that we sometimes mistake as a local problem, but understand to be just another disguise of the global political climate showing its different faces everywhere in the world.

However, I did not want to create a pretentious project that ventures to resolve any of the recurring crises: I wanted to problematize the most urgent yet deep-rooted and universal ones in a way that would not draw its force from the reactive and zealous forms of power that I had no interest in representing through some sort of mimetic art. Having eliminated realism out of my work for many years, I knew that my go-to literary device would be an allegory. I wanted to create a world like Alice's Wonderland, and that turned out to be the Mother's Land, where the bulk of my story takes place.

Still, this world required a relatable antihero through whom I could dismantle established identities and question the problem of acedia, which I picked as my urgent yet deep-rooted problem. This is, of course, a subjective observation based on my personal experiences, but I figured the theme of acedia (or Sloth) would be the best fit for my project: Secular sin of acedia explored through a highly theologized universe. A provocative series of questions would be raised in my work: What is it like to be an entity with multiple souls? How can multiple bodies simultaneously share a single soul? What about a body with no soul? How far can we go playing with things that do not exist? Are there different ways of non-existence? How do they affect our material experience?

I decided that my protagonist would have no soul, but unlike Faust, he would have no pact with the Devil. He would be slothful, naive, surprisingly benevolent and occasionally pretentious. There would be no apparent cause for the loss of his soul, and no teleological intervention in the story, but there would be mock-contracts to find his soul. He had to be a semi-autobiographical character, because it is easy to satirize others, but it is another thing to include yourself in the satirized community.

This also changed the concept of Mephistopheles for me. In Hopeless, the parallel figure is a stray dog called Mr. Four Legs, who does not appear to draw a diabolic deal but comes only after one has already lost his/her soul. Our protagonist, too, sees the dog on the same day he feels invisible, and the story begins. In the midst of his confusion, he receives a letter that tells him that the dog will guide him to his soul. We present the story in medias res, at the entrance of the Mother's Land where the dog takes him. It is our version of Inferno where the protagonist Mr. Hopeless is interrogated, psychoanalyzed, forced to make ethical decisions and shaken of his sloth as he seeks his soul. In this land, the dog functions like pseudo-Virgil, but Mr. Hopeless does not have Dante's poetic power.

The story does not move from Point A to Point B. We have created a postmodern, labyrinthine, fractal universe where animal characters at every threshold comes with their own background stories. This is where the choice of animals becomes important: In our own homeland as well as many parts of the world, animals are believed to have no soul, or to hold low ranks in the hierarchy of souls (as in Leibniz's philosophy). In our non-anthropocentric story, this hierarchy is dismantled: As the story progresses, Mr. Hopeless's status as the protagonist becomes unstable, he may or may not ever meet Mother the antagonist – a goddess-like ambiguous figure who hates souls. But it can be the best thing for Mr. Hopeless to have no place above animals! Animals also bring many symbolic meanings from various cultures to our work, which we love playing with; we are as fascinated with animals as great writers like Burroughs and Kafka. And as an artist inspired by the style of Al Columbia, Daniel Clowes, Tomer Hanuka, Connor Willumsen, Rafael Grampa, Herge and Jason, I love adapting my style to animals. Besides, animals are fun!

With all these in mind, you do not have to share same political/philosophical concerns with us. Remember that this is a satire, and we tried to keep it as simple as possible. It is a multi-layered, subtle work and can be read on any level. In fact, unless you are a masochist, we do not suggest digging too deep!

We invite you to take a closer look into Hopeless on Kickstarter. Merry Christmas!

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Josh Davison here: this looks like a very promising and intriguing project by two talented creators. This certainly looks worthy of your support. The project has just started and hasn't accumulated very much funding yet. If this looks like something you like and you have some money to kick their way, consider supporting this project.

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