to âexpressâ my âconceptâ in an abstract painting? Or gin up five-million dollars or so and make an art-house movie out of it?â
This question hung awkwardly in the air for five or six seconds. Rep could imagine a number of answers to it, but he didnât 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, âJust chill for a second.â
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.
âDidnât they sell anything but cars and cigarettes in the âfifties?â 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.
âKinky sex,â Ole said. âGreat.â
HELLLLO , Rep thought.
I canât wait to see where this oneâs going.
âThis sold a lot of Stafford Flour for General Mills in 1934,â 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.
Carlsenâs eyes snapped open as he sketched a quicksilver smile that Rep read as saying, âIâm way cooler than you but too polite to mention it.â
âSo?â Ole asked.
âComics,â Carlsen said.
Rep winced. After the smile it seemed a little anti-climactic, somehow.
âComics,â Ole said.
Carlsenâs arms spread wide and his face suddenly glowed with vibrant enthusiasm.
âStart 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-landâbut 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 isnât some new dyke sheriff, sheâs Lara Croft with a school marmâs 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
ââStep it upâ to what?â Ole asked.
â
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