Free Service Dress Blues by Michael Bowen

to ‘express’ my ‘concept’ in an abstract painting? Or gin up five-million dollars or so and make an art-house movie out of it?”
    This question hung awkwardly in the air for five or six seconds. Rep could imagine a number of answers to it, but he didn’t think that any of them would strike Ole as constructive. Carlsen, meanwhile, sat absolutely still, leaning back in his chair, eyes hooded, his rigid body somehow expressing not languor but inner excitement. Then, quite deliberately, he swiveled in his chair to face his keyboard. Ole scowled, but before his mouth opened Carlsen held up his right index finger in a gesture that said, “Just chill for a second.”
    After tapping nimbly at the keys he mouse-clicked through screen images at a speed suggesting late-night channel surfing by a college student with attention-deficit disorder. He paused for a moment at a cartoon image showing a woman in Lincoln green, drawing the string on a bow and arrow. Shaking his head, he clicked past it as Rep noticed that it was an ad for Chesterfield cigarettes. A few more clicks and another pause, this time at an ad showing a woman at the wheel of a race car. Again he went on.
    â€œDidn’t they sell anything but cars and cigarettes in the ’fifties?” he muttered.
    Another minute into the process he paused again. He looked contemplatively at the screen and then hit PRINT . The color sheet that he pulled from the muscular printer next to his computer was still warm when he laid it on the desk between Ole and Rep.
    â€œKinky sex,” Ole said. “Great.”
    HELLLLO , Rep thought.
I can’t wait to see where this one’s going.
    â€œThis sold a lot of Stafford Flour for General Mills in 1934,” Carlsen said.
    It was a full-page ad, mostly print but drawing the eye first to a bright cartoon at the center-top of the page. The cartoon depicted a comically dismayed cowboy who had stretched his torso through an open kitchen window to steal a slice of freshly-baked cake from the counter. The cook had caught him in the act and taken him by surprise. She had pinned him to the sill by pulling the window sash down tight against his waist. Now, grinning with unbecoming delight, she was smacking his rear end with a long-handled scouring brush. The tag-line said that Stafford Flour made food so good a real man would risk his skin to taste cake made with it.
    Carlsen’s eyes snapped open as he sketched a quicksilver smile that Rep read as saying, “I’m way cooler than you but too polite to mention it.”
    â€œSo?” Ole asked.
    â€œComics,” Carlsen said.
    Rep winced. After the smile it seemed a little anti-climactic, somehow.
    â€œComics,” Ole said.
    Carlsen’s arms spread wide and his face suddenly glowed with vibrant enthusiasm.
    â€œStart with simple comic strip story-lines, circulated on-line. Aim it first at college students and cynical gen-exers. Generate a little buzz and watch it spread to alienated pink-collar twenty-somethings on cubicle farms in Dilbert-land—but make it funny enough to force attention from political reporters. Hook them with subliminal kinky sex just like General Mills did, and then hammer them with our theme snuck in between the lines. Link them to every blog we can think of. Link them to a web-site with all the policy-wonk stuff spelled out. Gephardt isn’t some new dyke sheriff, she’s Lara Croft with a school marm’s ruler instead of a laser-gun and a big, maternal smile instead of a scowling pout. Non-threatening and reassuring, except to the bad guys. When we pass ten-thousand hits a day, we step it up.”
    â€œâ€™Step it up’ to what?” Ole asked.
    â€œ
Live action
comic strips. Human beings instead of drawings, but
behaving
like cartoon characters. Like
Ironman
, except three minutes instead of two hours, because technically
Ironman
was a live action