We are of the generation that believed and continues to believe that a significant power shift is taking place in the way that culture is produced and more specifically, who it is produced by. Digital technology has opened up film, music, writing of all kinds, visual art and of course comic books. UNFIT was a collaboration born of a few key ideas related to this broader sense of the zeitgeist.
We surrendered all hope of commercial success is return for dizzying and total creative of freedom. We rejected outright the logic of tailoring a piece of art / entertainment to suit a mythical target market and in so doing made it unlikely that we would ever be able to quit our day jobs.
And those day jobs? I find myself writing this in a Tennis Academy in Spain. And Paul? He is probably up a ladder backstage of a famous musical in London’s theatre district. So the conditions in which we work as UNFIT Comix are somewhat unorthodox (Or is this becoming the norm?). To me at least (and I hope Paul will comment on this) UNFIT means the following things...
1.) Zero or Extremely Low Budget.
2.) Make It Work.
3.) Do it with what you have.
4.) Risk and Investment = Compelling work
5.) Ignore 'The Industry' but study 'The Masters'
I suppose that above all what is important to me is storytelling and using storytelling as a way have a deeper relationship with Real Life as it is Really Happening, Right Now.
I believe that we are creatures of fiction as much as fact and that therefore fiction is a very powerful tool. It is a tool for re-imagining our relationships with each other and it has for too long been in the hands of culture tzars, 'creative professionals' etc. Comics are an ideally accessible format for bedroom revolutionaries; especially now digital printing has evolved so much so maybe the bedroom revolution is just around the corner after all.
Imagine it! No more mass media. Just masses of media from the masses, liberating the masses. Oops! Wrong meeting...
I believe that there are other keys to the aesthetic which were there from the inception. Of course, work commitments and geography are having an effect on our work practice but originally the key constraint was equipment. Working with small computers and simple programs led to the idea of working lossy, Make do and mend, and also, work compact and portable. So that has been carried over into this comic project. I don't have a lot of space, so I work on A4 to draw and blow that up for painting. I use water colours instead of painting digitally to allow texture and accidents to creep in. And I also take chances with the work, sometimes coming close to destroying it and having to repaint over sections. But through this I have been able to come up with more efficient methods of painting, and have been able to play with lighting in the scenes. Mistakes for instance led to using tippex pens directly to add highlights that could then be coloured in the garage scenes. I think that this approach has run throughout the work and has led to trying things out, rewriting and reworking things and ultimately, streamlining the story. Whether this will lead to better work practice in future stories, or will only lead to more ways to rework and utilise happy accidents remains to be seen. But the ultimate philosophy of Unfit means that it doesn't matter. And that is that this is our story, our world, our characters, and our way of producing it, without deadlines and time constraints, simply for our own enjoyment, and this is what I really think Pat means when he talks of a bedroom revolution. So why not create your own story instead of reading one, or in fact watching a badly translated film of one? Its much more challenging,lots of fun, and ultimately more fulfilling!
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