Current Reading: Chance Operations

My friend Rand sent me a copy of Todd Webb's short book Chance Operations thinking I would enjoy reading it. I read it yesterday afternoon, and I did enjoy it.

The book is a short (70 pages) collection of comics that Webb wrote in which he was inspired to use some of the elements of chance that John Cage used in his musical compositions. Cage used elements of randomness to determine how to arrange elements of his music, a process sometimes referred to as aleatoric music (ALEA comes from Latin for dice). 

Webb used a collection of fortunes he had collected from American Chinese restaurants found in fortune cookies -- which are NOT Chinese in origin -- as his text and a collection of found photographs as sources for his images that he drew himself. This method reminded me a bit of a magazine I used to subscribe to, Found Magazine.

In general, I am not a fan of superhero comics. But I do appreciate that avant-garde, oddball humor, and books and comics that could be described as experimental. So, I enjoyed reading Chance Operations.