One of my favourite strips I ever did. It still has a lot of meaning to me, every word and image selectively chosen, but naturally flowing. I sometimes wish I could make a career of this sort of thing, but I couldn't regularly write this sort of thing, and it doesn't mean much to most people. Art, repression, and sociology are irrelevant topics for most people, and I'm beginning to wonder why I care.

The ideas in this strip really hit at a lot of issues for me. The term 'new art, new life' is, of course, borrowed from Piet Mondrian, whose style was later fed to the world in the form of Ikea. He believed, in a very intelectual way, that if the art of your life changes, then your life changes. As such, he promoted abstraction heavily, believing it democratized art. But, the problem is, if you intellectualize art, it loses its feeling, and, re-reading this years later, I realize that I wanted to justify my lust and pleasure (my feeling), as Max and Rick debate hot-pants (a fashion crime which gives me a semi none the less). It's not specifically Western, but there is an intellectual/moral obligation to be able to justify one's 'way'. Fuck that. Now I know I am a machine/animal, but, you can see, at that time, I was still trying to justify a lot. And in the end, both characters are wrong in their opinion, because they care, one way or another. The answer seems to me now to be to accept things, without justifying them. But that's what makes a good story, doesn't it? Characters who believe what they are saying.

Furthermore, the title, Boxes on the Horizon, is one or the few solid ideas I managed to write down. Animals don't label or doubt, that is a very human thing. For example, I loathed to call myself an artist when I was in university, but I still insisted on it. To say you're an artist is definitely a box, and assumes to place a stronger value on everything you say or do. I'm reminded of an old SNL sketch where Phil Hartman, as Picasso, doodles on a napkin, and says, "here, pay for your kid's university tuition, I'm Picasso!" The idea being, artists are, 24-7, 'deep'. Truth is, I'm an animal as much as anyone... Anyway, as a human, people get stressed about the box they put themselves in, be it artist, family member, however you introduce yourself, and in my mind, this is going to get worse, as people are put more and more in an unrealistic position of having to be 'special'. For some it works, for most, I doubt it does. And those are the boxes I see on the horizon, not just those depressing apartments in the final panel. Those are just a comedic play on the title, thrown in as a comedic jest to round out the strip. That is specifically the type of meta-humour that sours people on intellectualism, but, fuck all of you people, it's a deep, rich kind of comedy.