Poetry for the ‘art-and-lit’ sensitive

"We've faced environmental complaints," admitted Joey Comeau, the writer of "A Softer World."

Speaking of the comic's recently-published second book, "Second Best isn't so Bad," he continued, "[But] if we only sell five hundred? Then we've made a huge return on our initial funds, and we can just pulp the other six thousand."

Eschewing the modest fatalism commonly found in the comic's type-written dialogue which, at times, recalls the pathos of Peanuts' earliest era, ASW displays a world where those inhabiting it, artfully captured by photographer Emily Horne, communicate themselves by way of subtext and empty space amid periodic, latent felix culpas.

However, the otherwise subtly-rendered vagueness found within most of the several hundred strips, Comeau explains, has nothing to do with art.

"[Emily and I] got talking and bouncing ideas back and forth, and we came up with the concept of a comic where nonsense phrases were put over top of stock photographs, and  marketed artistically rather than commercially."  He added, "It is created purposefully vague so people can read whatever theme they want into it. (...) This works best, we find, with the younger demographic, especially middle class Caucasians."

While Comeau's art-and-lit sensitive readership may be horrified their latter-day Corso claims his work to be little other than a low-overhead business venture which is assumingly exploiting the populations of rural Columbia and most of outer Los Angeles, it's not really important because, as said readers know but don't like to admit, so are their shoes. (Deny it!)

Reading each "Softer World" in procession of the others creates an impression of having stumbled into a visual haiku which isn't concerned about its excessive syllables.

Each captures a specific moment or thought within its three panels which evoke musings somewhere between those classically accredited to either Melpomene or Thalia— "Naked boys live there under the waves and we talk and talk / but today I brought my harpoon gun  / because a girl has needs"; another begins with a close-up of a woman's lower face accompanied by a caption reading "There are no sweeter words than this."

Followed by "nothing lasts forever," the final panel silently reveals her to be sitting next to a clean-cut young man with a banjo: we know her pain and wince because he'll never figure these things out.

But what does this mean! Paragraphs like the one previous can be illustrative of Comeau's assertions, but "art" or not, how many people can such an aesthetic appeal to?

"When I meet people at parties," he remarked, "who are not familiar with the comic, I tell them it has a readership of 100,000 plus. (...) We have been working with a computer firm to modify the engine that creates our comic to reference non-controversial yet still topical events [and] we hope to one day be as efficient and pervasive as the McDonald's corporation."

Reached for clarification, Horne affirmed, "Joey's words stand for me too." To delve deeper and keep the blind sick, "A Softer World" can be found with adding ".com" to its name.