Don’t forget to read the fine print
New York graphic novelist uses Steve Jobs’ image to illustrate iTunes contract
What do Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment and the iTunes terms and conditions agreement all have in common?
Each is epically long, and despite a nagging feeling that you should have read it, you probably haven’t.
That is the sweet spot for the mischievous, pastiche-heavy artist Robert Sikoryak, whose comic book adaptations have typically combined cartoons with classic literature, including Dostoyevsky in the style of Batman and Dante’s Inferno as told via Bazooka Joe bubble-gum-wrapper parodies.
For his new graphic novel, Terms and Conditions, Sikoryak upped the difficulty level for his long-term conceptual project: Instead of abridging a book, he lifted the complete text of Apple’s mind-numbing corporate boilerplate, which users must agree to before accessing iTunes, and mashed it up with art invoking more than a century of comics.
Rather than merely drawing in the loose style of another artist, Sikoryak modelled each page after specific bits of others’ work, mimicking panels from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s The Amazing Spider-Man, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, among others.
The result, Sikoryak explained, combines his childhood love for Mad magazine spoofs with John Cage’s theories of art and the influence of Art Spiegelman.
“I felt that my work was kind of derivative, and I didn’t want to be a second-rate version of what was happening in comics elsewhere,” Sikoryak said, recalling his days as an art student at Parsons School of Design in the late 1980s. “The answer to all my issues with unconscious pastiche was to just make it conscious.”
More than two decades into that endeavour, Sikoryak found that the iTunes terms and conditions appealed to him as source material precisely because they don’t lend themselves to illustration. “It’s anti-comics,” he said. “It seems counterintuitive, and if it’s counterintuitive, it’s probably interesting to do.”
To create a narrative through line for Terms and Conditions, the artist used the recognizable signifiers of Steve Jobs, an Apple founder, in almost every frame, dressing a character in Jobs’ customary attire. “The glasses, the beard, the hair, the black turtleneck, the jeans and the sneakers — he had a costume that was as iconic as Charlie Brown’s zigzag or Batman’s bat symbol,” Sikoryak said.
What began as a small side project bloomed into a full graphic novel from publisher Drawn and Quarterly when Sikoryak’s colourful scenes featuring the dull text drew attention on Tumblr. He posted them there at the urging of Françoise Mouly, art director for The New Yorker.
“I didn’t imagine anyone would pay me for this,” Sikoryak said, calling the high-concept bit a “very silly idea.”
Yet, as it turns out, Sikoryak, who uses Apple products and insisted he does not feel adversarial toward the company, was also preserving the historical record. Not long after he finished drawing Terms and Conditions, Apple amended its user agreement, as the company shifted focus from iTunes toward the streaming platform Apple Music. The absurdly detailed text, which somehow became readable through Sikoryak’s playful interpretation, shrunk from 20,669 words to just under 7,000 in what is now called the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.
“This is the unabridged version,” Sikoryak said of his book.
Surrounded by comics at his apartment in New York’s East Village, Sikoryak detailed some of the multi- layered references found in Terms and Conditions. Family Circus: Family Circus is most famous for the daily comic, which is a single panel with a line underneath, but often the Sundays would have all of the children speaking over one another, with a million word balloons on the page. That’s a strip that I have some feelings for from when I was a kid. Garfield: In most pages, I’ll have someone operating some computer, and somehow Garfield’s head just reminded me of the iMac. I’m actually really happy with that page. Garfield’s not even really in it, but you know it’s Garfield. Wonder Woman: It’s very iconic and kind of out of time, even in the ’40s. Everything about the old Wonder Woman comics feels like they’re coming from a different world than Superman and Batman, so I really wanted to get that in. My Little Pony: I went to the iTunes comics page to see what was popular. I wasn’t that familiar with the My Little Pony comic, but it met the parameters of what I needed. Peanuts: Joe Cool, the Snoopy persona, is not that far from Steve Jobs. I had to use Peanuts, that’s why it’s in the first 10 pages or so, because that was one of the first things I knew I wanted to do.