I’m all revved up about Stay As You Are, Brad Yung’s meta-ironic comic strip for youngsters and young adults everywhere. Now that even the unique blend of sarcasm, truth and hilarity that used to belong to us has been co-opted by the so-called main-stream market forces, we need clear-minded, vicious students of the rhetoric of modern discourse to help us fight back. So Yung, one half of the zine Juxtappose (see our second issue for the interview), has compiled this collection of existential inanities, an endless conversation between a rotating group of fairly similar apartment-mates who might just as well be your best friends; I’m talking college educated, extremely bored, incredibly pessimistic guys just sitting around trying to be ironic without being ironic. Well, maybe you don’t know. But you should know. Because Yung is illustrating something extremely prescient: Irony for irony’s sake is dead. In its place will be something else, a post- irony, which, in Stay As You Are, becomes a sort of meta-irony; when everything is ironic, even irony must be accepted as literal truth. “Does this mean irony is passe now?” cries one of Yung’s generic characters. But in the very recognition of irony’s failure to articulate the clarion call of the post-angst generation, a new all encompassing irony arises. Yung’s comics speak to an evolving and emerging way of thinking about consciousness in North American society This is an important document. Humour has become a way of saying absolutely nothing. The circle closes in on itself.
comic #1 main creator: Brad Yung $2 PO Box 30007, Parkgate PO, N. Vancouver, BC, V7H 2Y8