Dirk Deppey says: “I interviewed the creator of Flaming Carrot Comics and the mind behind the Mystery Men movie, Bob Burden, for The Comics Journal a few months back, and the issue in which it appears hits the comics-shop shelves today. The link is an excerpt from said interview, in which Mr. Burden holds forth on a subject very near and dear to his heart: the nature of surrealism.
DEPPEY: I think if I had to pinpoint the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen it would have to be a PBS special I saw as an early teenager on Japanese Noh theater, which is sort of the grotesque version of Kabuki. The special opened up with what seemed like this eight-minute shot of a woman who was bare from the middle of her breasts on up. It was a very tight angle, close-up shot of that, with her head tilted way back, looking over her shoulder at the camera with this utterly maniacal gleam in her eyes — like she was about to devour a kitten or something. After about a minute of this, a little patch of saliva began slowly sliding out of the side of her mouth, slowly running down her chin, slowly running down her neck. Everything else was absolutely still…BURDEN: You were hypnotized.
DEPPEY: Absolutely. [Burden laughs.] It was just, you know, up until that point one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. And yet, it was composed of such simple and obvious things. It wasn’t like her head was popping off and cuckoo birds were flying out or anything else. It was a very still, static, composed shot of a familiar thing in completely unfamiliar circumstances.
