So this of course is the first chapter of Gumfield. I would consider it my seminal work at this point, though it started out as a barely crystallized concept much earlier and was not to take the form of a comic, but instead an extended collection of personal essays I would dub "The Barbarous Virtues." When penning this exhaustive treatise on the decline of Western Civilization, I at some point took pause. There was a little cat down the street and the way he rested against the plumage as the night turned to dusk piqued my fancy for a new form in which my idea should take shape, and thus, Gumfield was formed. Gum taken of course from the Egyptian word Kemmai, to which I held that Gumfield dealt with a kind of slow devouring of civilization from the inside out, and of course field, referring to the fields of elysium, a sort of idyllic pasture representing mans ascendance from a coil of suffering in this current age of turmoil.
Of course Gumfield here is an analog to the chaos of suffering in the Kali Yuga. He is quickly stricken by illness which creates great trouble for his human master John. John, whose form is drawn as purposely deformed and emasculated is a figure quickly discarded - a proverbial Abel, soon to be slain by Cain - a man without brahmic purpose or a place within a meaningful hierarchy literally murdered by a figure representing the abysmal cult of personality and celebrity in the form of Michael Jackson. John cries out in confusion and anger as the unpredictability of Gumfield creates an unfamiliar situation. He is of course crying out at the very lack of control he has become a victim of.
The blatantly obvious punchline here of course is the IRONY in the fact that while John laments this very limited moment in spatial time, that the Kali Yuga has actually persisted for many centuries. Johns reaction is more accurately a moment of terrible self-awareness, as though he has woken up in the middle of a nightmare he was not aware was taking place to begin with. Eventually, the outcome is that he cannot escape disaster. John is quickly taken advantage of by a corrupt system, and, in a horrible act of malpractice representing further emasulation, completely loses his ability to engage in conscious thought or discourse, the same way in which an overtly socialist mindset has horrificly stifled free speech. John represents man, the brother, the son. He is discarded as though he were trash, his corpse desecrated and trampled on by the vapid toxicity of noise-culture.
This is of course a pedestrian interpretation, one very simplistic, though there are deeper layers there for the curious to explore. The sharper of my readers will be able to see between the lines and find the REAL humorous bits. But I suspect this will mostly be relegated to students of Kantian dialogue, and not fit for those satisfied with the simple bemusement of more "modern" interpretations of religious texts.
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