![]() ![]() On top of which, Crash Course is a study of metropolitan exploration, setting off down roads at random which never quite connect together or conclude and so it's not far from another number high on the modernist hit parade, the détournement, a deliberate loosening of reality's screws to see which way it falls. Woodrow Phoenix arrives somewhere similar in a modern setting, through a rolling sequence of roads without any of their natural inhabitants or intended routine purpose. As well as inflaming the imaginations of several dingbat Futurists, the car allowed exactly what the modernists were chasing after, a poetic experience of modern phenomena. When the motor car originally belched and backfired its way into art around 1895, it was pulled in by the mildly mind-blowing changes of perspective it allowed an artist to experience in their own seeing, before becoming a full conscript in a central modernist enterprise: a conflict between the avant-garde of engineering and the avant-garde of art. Phoenix's intentions in Crash Course probably did not include making modernist art, but in practice he has taken several strides towards it anyway. Vehicles and drivers and pedestrians are all absent, leaving the traffic signals issuing orders to nothing. This empire of signs, sometimes in context in the landscape but just as often in tight closeup as items of graphic design, turns the book's universe into a single work of engineering construction - lacking only two significant elements, the cars and the people themselves. Some pages peer down more closely at the tarmac and the marks painted on it: arrows, crossings, center lines, lane borders, instructions, permissions and prohibitions. Highways, freeways, flyovers, bridges, side roads and sidewalks, a headlight-level viewpoint of the motor car's domain and the landscape that it traverses, rendered in crisp black, white and grey. But those comics are about the trip Crash Course is about the road.ĭrawings of those roads occupy all the pages of the book. Coincidental timing has queued up a number of comics road trips recently: Fantagraphics reprinted the Manchette/Tardi West Coast Blues with hit men and quarry scuttling up and down the French autoroute network in the stifling heat, and the latest volume of The Complete Crepax includes Nobody, following Philip Rembrandt's meander across America as a reworked Odysseus, comics' pre-eminent continental drifter. Comics of protest feed on fury while comics of reportage bear witness, and Woodrow Phoenix taps the two veins at once in Crash Course for a book that wants both to testify and accuse.
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