Sikoryak has made his comics career out of taking words and pictures
from other people and mashing them together -- most notably collected in
Masterpiece Comics.
His thing generally is to redraw famous comics pages -- sometimes new
pages in the style of someone old and/or dead, but usually the famous art itself -- and put different words into the balloons, for amusing, satiric, and or artsy purposes.
A
couple of years ago, he decided, for whatever reason, to abandon high
literature and take his text from much duller reality -- Apple's iTunes
Terms and Conditions, a legal document that millions of us have accepted
without actually reading. The book Terms and Conditions
explains, in a short postscript, how he went about working on this
project, and which iterations of the changing legal document were used
for various versions of these pages, but it never actually tells us why he did it.
The
book also never mentions that Sikoryak replaced the main characters in
all of this redrawn art with what looks like a Steve Jobs figure -- the name
Jobs is never mentioned, nor the fact that this book has a single main
character throughout all of its hundred art styles. But it's what he
did, and you can see many of the styles of Job on the front cover.
Sikoryak's
postscript also notes that he worked on his book in batches of pages, a
dozen or so at a time. He would draw those page and then shoehorn some
T&C onto them, and then go onto the next batch. So he didn't pick
pages to coincide with the text; he just redrew a bunch of famous comics
pages to star Steve Jobs instead, and then tossed what is essentially
lorem ipsum text onto those pages.
It's all very arty. But I don't really see the purpose or use of it. Terms and Conditions
can have no artistic unity in any way -- each page in completely
independent, and the text is pure legal boilerplate. The enjoyment in
reading it is primarily in recognizing each page (if you do so
instantly) or in trying to figure out the source if it's vaguely
familiar. It is a cold and pointless thing, of interest primarily to people who like conceptual art.
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