The only evidence necessary to indict and convict me of the following charge is the fact that I’m sharing this information long after it’s useful—I’m terrible at self-promotion. If I was on top of it, I could have let you know about where I showed my art in April and May (it’s now the end of June), and those of you here in Albuquerque would have had a chance to see it in person. However, since the work was part of larger projects it’s not wholly irrelevant to share it now.

So, now I present to you The Way Is Death, my undergraduate Honors Thesis which was exhibited at Scum Pit Comics, and Reading Rivers, which was part of a group show at UNM’s John Sommers Gallery.

The Way Is Death

First, I need to thank Mikee, Alex, Sam, Joe, and Squid of Scum Pit Comics for hosting my work for a week, for promoting and selling my prints, and for everything they do in building a local community around comics. Without your support it would have been much more difficult for me to fulfill the requirements of my Honors Thesis. Thank you for helping me cross the finish line and graduate with honors.

The Way is Death is my attempt to do an original work of philosophy in the medium of comics. Technically all art does philosophy (maybe I’ll write about why that is in the future) but, as far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been a comic that explicitly attempts to do philosophy in the traditional sense since Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, in which he explains not only how to understand the content of comics but also his understanding of what it means to be a comic. Since then there have been comics about philosophy, and philosophically inclined comics, but there is room for more comics that add knowledge to the corpus of philosophy.

Central to Understanding Comics is the question of the “being” of comics. When we inquire into most things, what we’re ultimately seeking is an understanding of the “being” of that that thing. What does it mean to be that thing and under what conditions can it be what it is? I’m getting a little abstract here but don’t let me lose you. In The Way is Death, what I hope to understand is the “being” of death.

On the surface this seems like an impossible goal as death is defined by an inability to be. That being the case, there should be nothing for death to be and therefore no “being” to ask about. However, we understand death as a fact in the world though our own physical deaths are yet to occur. The fact that death “is” means that it has “being” and that there is something to investigate. If death is a mode of being that expresses and inability to be, it reveals “bare existence,” meaning that something “is” and yet there is nothing for it to “be” (sorry for all the terms in quotations). If you could experience your own bare existence then you could experience the being of death without physically dying. In my book I call this existential death (which I got from Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger by Iain Thomson). What can be learned from existential death helps us understand what it means to be a “self,” what truth is, and if we are living authentically.

If you can’t wait for The Way is Death to come out before exploring these ideas check out Thompson’s book or, if you really want to challenge yourself, Being and Time by Martin Heidegger. Circling back to how art does philosophy, Alva Noë explains this in Strange Tools. I’ve linked each of these titles to my favorite bookstore if you’re interested in getting them.

Other Paths

Reading Rivers is a comic I made to show how the materials used in an artwork contribute to the meaning of the work. The comic is about walking along The Rio Grande near where I live and is drawn with ink made from material I found there. It was displayed the John Sommers Gallery in May and was set up in a way that the viewer had to walk through the story to read it. I’d say more but this post is going long. You can see more of both of these works at my website hellopinello.com.

Tomorrow night, as of this writing (which does you no good since it will already have happened by the time I post this) my friend and I are hosting a community drawing night at Scum Pit Comics. It’s called Slingin’ Ink and we do it one Thursday a month from 6-8pm. If you’re interested follow Scum Pit on Instagram for updates on the next one.