Dutch Technique: Comic Books, Discourse and Vedanta/The Saga of the Atlantean

Abstract

Dutch Technique is a work of experimental art which refuses classification and emerges variously in the form of comic-book pages, non-fiction writings, prose fiction, poetry and visual art. DT questions traditional binary modes of thinking which contrast sciences and arts, high arts and low arts, academic and non-academic discourse, science and religion/mysticism, and eschews discriminatory tribalism. It explores the inexhaustibility of the text, ideas and being in the form of comedy, drama, rhetoric, philosophical analysis and synthesis, poetic evocation and drama, liturgy and ritual. Its primary sources are self-reflection, contemplation in the analytical/synthetic philosophical mode and in meditation, trance and altered states of being, and the practise of art as self-revelation, healing, therapy, entertainment and communication. Its textual sources are film (particularly science fiction and comedies) comic books, philosophical texts (primarily those of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Existentialism). As literature it mines stream of consciousness, experimental modes, satire, genre and literary fiction, poetry and popular song. Also central is scripture and what may be termed, “the Perennial Philosophy” exemplified by Vedanta. Incorporated into this experimental mix is a traditional academic thesis The Superhero and the Self which argues that superhero comics can fruitfully be considered as spiritual literature. The Saga of the Atlantean is a graphic novel which embodies the critical stance of Dutch Technique in utilising what is generally conceived as a 'low art' genre – the superhero story – with a serious purpose and high art pretentions, without avoiding various characteristics which might be considered typical of the genre. It is a meta-textual work which comments both blatantly and obliquely on the form of comics and the human condition. TSOTA can be read separately from the rest of the work or as an integral component. It can be read prior to the other work, interspersed with its chapters or after it. As Dutch Technique asserts; there is no beginning, there is no middle, there is no end.