One of the most popular and enduring of
Vancouver-published
zine-
comics,
Brad Yung's
SAYA is a verbose, straightforward but complex look at the interactions between a
quasi-autobiographical protagonist and one of his close friends / roommates as they explore the issues around "
Generation X",
irony,
marketing and the
media,
irony,
apathy,
postmodernism,
irony,
existentialism,
irony and
post-irony.
The text of a typical strip runs as follows:
PANEL 1:
BRAD: OK, now watch: this commercial is telling us that only cool people use their product.
PANEL 2:
BRAD: Therefore, if I buy their product, I must be cool too.
PANEL 3:
BRAD: But truly cool people wouldn't need that kind of validation.
PANEL 4:
BRAD: The people who actually buy these products are pathetic, low-self esteem losers who want to appear to be cool and are too stupid to realize they've been manipulated.
PANEL 5:
BRAD: This whole ad campaign is based on a hypocritical target market and is completely contradictory to the imagery shown and the messages conveyed.
PANEL 6:
FRIEND: So, should I buy the product or not?
BRAD: Sure, but only to be ironic.
FRIEND: And irony's cool, right?
BRAD: Yeah... no... shut up...
The name of the comic is derived from a quote from Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man:
"When Sputnik had first gone into orbit a schoolteacher asked her second-graders to write some verse on the subject. One child wrote:
Individual
issues can be got at $2 a piece (for approximately 30-38 zine-pages of comic plus the continuing adventures of
Ninja Bear) -
postage included - from (ahem)
Stay as you Are and all quotes from it presented above are (c) Brad Yung. See also www.stayasyouare.com