Since Bosch the madness has been occupying many times the plastic and literary imaginary...

The "Museum Newsletter"
(http://arteonline.arq.br/newsletter/reviews2005/english_niss.htm) is
analysing "The Spork World" (http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/) by Millie Niss:

"Why Spork is a cartoon?

I wanted to make a site about a mentally ill person going through all the troubles with the system and with the illness that mentally ill folks have to endure – hospitalizations, trouble with Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, voices, depression, mania, paranoia, stigma from friends,employment discrimination, etc., but then it seemed that the story would be either horrendously depressing (not in the clinical sense, of course) or nastily uplifting (if the character successfully surmounted all difficulties). I wanted humor in my website, and yet needed a place from which to launch serious ideas. Also, I didn't know how I would get a non-mentally ill audience to read the story." (Millie Niss)

"Then there's Spork's antenna. "Spork's History" makes it clear that his antenna is virtually the same thing as his identity, at least in his own mind: "My antenna is ME!" he screams when his teacher, Ms Meddling, explains that it will be a disadvantage in later life and ought to be surgically removed. But the fact that the curious wobbly looking appendage on top of his head is always referred to as an "antenna" seems to imply that it allows him to pick up information which other people (or birds) cannot hear. At times Spork hears voices - "The voices continued even when he plugged his ears. From that time on, Spork was tormented by cruel voices…" - and the mere use of the word antenna leads us to wonder, without anything explicit ever being said, if these voices are coming from somewhere outside him rather than being purely delusional. But the antenna doesn't just convey material into Spork's head: it grows out of his head like a mad idea - oversized, brightly-coloured, wobbly and eccentric. It seems symbolic ofSpork's thoughts, his compulsions, his inner life. It makes him what he is, it gives him his peculiar abilities, but it also marks him out, like the mark of Cain." (Edward Picot)

Reading Spork's Stories and knowing previously some texts on madness, one verifies that Spork's cartoons own a strong theoretical basement. Niss offers that knowledge in an extremely creative and well humored way, so that it becomes easy to anyone understand Spork's problems. Then one realizes that the Spork character is made of Millie Niss' thoughts and dreams and humor and that the madness of Spork cartoon is extreme lucidity.

Much more at: http://arteonline.arq.br/newsletter/reviews2005/english_niss.htm

Regina Celia Pinto

http://arteonline.arq.br
http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm
http://bigsheep.blogspot.com (A NEW Blog - Big Sheep!)