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Maybe you have heard the rumors online, maybe this is news for you: Me, your most humble jawsmith Baruch Caan, is going to continue the legendary Fictionarian webcomic strip Bison & the Boar Boys! But how did it come to this?!? For years people kept asking me about my take on this one. “What is it about that Bison?” And since I haven’t figured out the answer for myself yet, I kept coming back to it. Everyone seems to have some kind of opinion, and so did I. Drunk talk led to ridiculously ambitious debates, so at some point I decided to do some research. I mean, why not? You can do research on anything these days. When my column started to pick up steam a while ago, I was invited to speak at the XVII. Colloquium of “Literature, Arts, and Stuff in the Southlands” at New Greenridge College, and they basically handed me a Carte Blanche to bother or enthrall my esteemed audience with whatever I deemed appropriate. Quite naturally, I picked the Bison. My “(Brief) Cultural History of Bison & the Boar Boys” raised some brows and, in the end, I was not even denied access to the conference dinner. I have given that talk quite a few times now, continuously collecting more pieces of the puzzle. There is always someone in the audience offering an “haven’t you heard?” And even the more sober conversations tend to gravitate towards the point when, as I said, everyone has an opinion. Probably you do, too, or you wouldn’t be reading this.
Tracing History
History is always a fickle subject. Every time I get overly obsessed with it, many of my esteemed peers drop out of the conversation. But let’s look at the things we know. The episodes most people are familiar with were uploaded on the current repository from 2084 onwards, shortly after the Cull Haven Bridge was turned into a political statement by a group of terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. Episode #1 presents readers the three Boar Boys’ baffling boredom and a giant Bison basically not giving a shit, stressing he just took a dump instead. Bison Style! It’s quite funny, really. To this day, we do not know who came up with, drew, or uploaded this fabrication, but I could fill 8,000 words with all the rumors and conjectures. Some insist it was the King and his loyal Artist, somewhere far away from their exile, as everyone knows what a funny fellow our old ruler was known to be. Yarns like these, entangled in spry shambles of mystery and political insinuation, certainly added to the readers interest. Quickly, a healthy amount of “Bison Style!” seeped into our vernacular. Okay. The run of episodes ends with strip #41, uploaded 1.5 years later in early 2086. “The creator(s) went missing!,” that much everyone agrees about, although not precisely where we know it from. There are tons of websites about it, but I won’t concern myself with grapevine here. I have never been – and am still not – fiction!
We can be fairly sure that the 41 strips on the current repository were, by all accounts, not the first Bison & the Boar Boys cartoons. I have seen student’s pamphlets passed around on cheap paper in Gaining, most certainly dating back to 2082 or earlier. Walk down into any comic book stronghold in Orange Cliff and you will hear praise on a legendary earlier season – printed on leaflets or stored in some cryptic backpocket of the net – that a friend of someone’s friend remembers fondly. There are thousands of memes online featuring variants of Boars and Bisons. Note that in many of them there are four Boars instead of three, actually, often addressing the observer in direct speech. Was there a fourth sibling that was dropped in the later installments that we enjoy to this day? We simply cannot know. What we do know is that there’s tons of unauthorized merchandise (who would you ask for a license anyway?) all over the place. Youngsters love to embellish their shirts, room walls, or stationary with some of those fart jokes.
Lecturing about Humor (Don‘t!!)
So, what is Bison & the Boar Boys all about? Clearly, you should never, ever lecture about humor. I’m gonna be doing exactly that now. The #41 episodes all have the exact same protagonists, one Bison and three Boars, although some other animals are frequently mentioned (but never shown): some ocelot, a gnu, and that meerkat. Looking more closely, however, there even fewer speaking/acting positions than four, as the triplet is neither named nor individuated, always acting in unison – at least at first. At the bone of it, BBB revolves around a power differential that is equally characterized by (a lack of) knowledge and (a lack of) agency between both positions. The Boar Boys seem to have no knowledge of their joint whereabouts, clearly a Zoo to the reader, in which, for some reason, they share a compound with that Bison. In the last quarter of the run, they start questioning the nature of their world, suspecting the Bison to possess some sort of knowledge which he, naturally, won’t surrender. While the Boar Boys are constantly running in circles looking for distraction and, frankly, anything to do in their cage, the Bison is only ever drawn in two different resting positions, once dowsing, once burping. He is entirely defined by his unwillingness to act in any sort of meaningful way. Agency in BBB, however, is not only, or maybe not even primarily defined by the ability to inflict change. The Bison rather represents the more primordial agency to resist change and remain entirely indifferent to circumstances. The price he willingly or unwillingly pays, it seems, is a complete identification with the order of their world, the Zoo, forever unquestioned.
The first ten episode focus on situational humor and practical jokes entirely. None of the characters seem to command over any sort of memory about earlier events or episodes. Basically you can read them in any order. Consciousness does not transcend the three panels that form the actual prison more so than any bar in the background. Starting with episode #11, however, the strips start to evolve on a strange trajectory towards enclosed micro-arcs, the first (#11-19) revolving around an attempted differentiation within the triplet: One of the brothers dissociates his position from that of his siblings, struggling for some sort of individual identity to go along with a subtle bloom of memory. The Bison emerges as the only imaginable source of identity that he starts to emulate (“Do it!” “Bison Style!” “Nope! Still not There!”, #11), but this must remain unattainable. His inability to become Bison leads to a restoration of the Status Quo, finally. “Let’s Play Hide and Seek” (#19). The Bison sighs in annoyance, rather than in relief.
A second micro-arc (#20-29) follows the entire triplet on an exploration of their identity as a group – again entirely focused on the Bison. In the third and final arc (#30-41), the episodes focus on the topics of memory and consciousness more lucidly, as the triplet suddenly realizes they need more information to transcend the situational context of the Zoo, that is their world, that is the strip itself. “Information is needed on: A: Us. B: Situation. C: Home” (#37). Suspecting the Bison to be in possession of such knowledge, they confront him multiple times, but this is where the strip stops. Suspiciously, the last words uttered within the whole run seem to address an outside observer as much as the (still and forever) secretive primary resident: “You know something. But you don’t want us to know! So that we don’t know” (#41). Transcendence of the three panels remains impossible, but one cannot help to wonder what would have happened if the creator(s) had not disappeared without a trace, suspending not only an ongoing myth of Fictionarian popular culture but also the Boar Boys’ inquiry for an escape of consciousness.
Appropriation and Political Symbolism
More so than any rumors about the DUF identifying and silencing the artist(s) behind BBB, I would argue it was that overall thematic obsession with liberation that has turned the strip into some kind of political symbol. Drawings, tags, and graffiti of the Bison can be found on many walls, alleys, and monuments (especially) on towns dotting the western coast, not rarely accompanied by that “Rise!” symbol unequivocally pledging loyalty to the DUF’s sworn enemy, our former King! This is surprising for a number of facts, however. The topics of revolution and rebellion are merely hinted at vaguely in the strips. The closest the Boar Boys get to some grand agenda is in episode #8 when the Bison asks them plainly whether they were up to “overthrow the keepers. Want in?” – only to mock their excitement (“YES!” “Definitely!” “When? When?”) bitterly with a sly “Never. Suck it.”
One has to ask who’d be rebelling against what, exactly? Looking at the tags and symbols I found around Cull Haven, Catherineborough, and New Greenridge – I haven’t been able to do much research in places like Lawpolis or Orange Cliff, sadly – one could find support for two different, although strikingly contradicting propositions. On the one hand, there’s that tagline “NO BISON!”, found especially on shopping malls and official DUF buildings (for hours at a time only, always swiftly removed). A challenge to order and authority, certainly, a stubborn expression to deny the Lawmaker acceptance as a source of identification and norm. If “NO BISON!” displays a desperate identification with the Boar Boys and their growing discontent within their 3-panel-bars, how come that “NOT AT ALL!” has become a competing catchphrase for rebellion? The latter clearly assumes the perspective of the Bison as a mocking symbol for resilience, fundamentally denying all claims on “acceptable” behavior!
Not At All?
These two, diametrically opposed stances on the political currency of BBB seem not only to compete, but also to coexist with each other, as the lyrics of a popular Cull Haven tavern song prove: “They’re No Bison – Not at All / Remember Him, so say we All!” Him, of course, referring once again to the King. It must remain a stipulation if the songsmiths were blatantly confusing and intermixing the two different positions that the 41 strips offer, or whether this hints at the fact that not any of the characters, but Bison & the Boar Boys itself – the strip, that crude fabrication – is taken as a statement against the “Law and Order” offered by the Departement of Unethical Fiction. This, at least, would explain the adolescent humor about farts and hairy Bison balls.
Be that as it may, I am going to cut to the chase. The Bison is about to return! Out of pure luck, fate, or happenstance, I have come into the possession of the original digital files used to compose the 41 episodes of Bison & the Boar Boys. I have been struggling against the temptation for a while now, but finally decided I could not resist any longer. I am sure many will complain, and I do not claim or expect to rival what is online already and what, certainly, will remain the legacy it has become. I do know, however, that the Bison was there a long time before that, and I think he needs to keep holding his ground. I would love to provide you with some kind of manifesto at this point why we need him now more than ever, but as I said: I have still no idea what it is about this Bison. I cannot deny my obsession, however, so best acting accordingly, and in good faith.
All Bison Style, no Fiction!
Baruch Caan
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