Is "Mere Existence" the future of the comic strip?
by Mike Kravinsky
Lev's industry is doing his roughly 3 minute animations, more than 30 so far, as well as individual comics, based on his life experiences and beliefs. Started in 2003, he tries to put them out monthly. They've been described as "bleakly hilarious." A compliment I'm sure as one of his biggest influences is Matt Groening's series "Life in Hell"
What makes the series so engaging, is that Lev doesn't just take the path of the lowest common denominator in picking the topic of the month. Rather, they seem to truly cover what's really on the mind of the artist. The "Tales" series can be silly as in "How to break up with your girlfriend in 64 easy steps" which has at this writing the most views of his series. Or "God" which hits buttons for the believer, and non-believers. It's not funny, but quite profound. There's even an installment called "Coping with Depression" on the advice he got from people during a time he was going through it.
Not only does "Tales of Mere Existence" include the life travels of Lev, they rely on appearances by his family which he notes is close to real life, albeit with some embellishment to add a little punch. When he talks to his mother these days, she may stop him mid-conversation and want to know if this is going to end up in a video.
After graduating the School of the Museum of Fine arts at home in Boston. He tried to go the fine arts route, but he realized that the art world was it's own little world. "Most regular people don't have anything to do with it and I don't have any interest in this." But he took his training and techniques learned and applied them to something that was more accessible. But accessible doesn't mean commercial to Lev, "that means your gearing it particularly so people will like it, so it will be popular... I'm happy that people are paying attention to it, but I'm not interested in making a piece specifically so people will like it." That being said, Lev does actively try to market the "Tales" series with books and DVD's. Just don't mention the word demographic to him when talking about his audience, he prefers "the people who look at my shit".
The series came about after he moved to San Francisco. Initially, he had a tough time making friends, so his first stories were from an isolationist point of view. Like Here. The very first one, at 29 seconds, was made after a night of drinking, and accompanying hangover.
The process Lev uses to create "Tales" is kept a secret, but he began with a couple ideas that he thought would work well together. One was the style of animation. In 1956, a film called "Mystery of Picasso", used an animation style where the animator painted from the back creating real time look, even though it's animated. The second, was the narration. He started by imitating comic Steven Wright, and the voice evolved from that.
And then there's the writing, "One of the primary motivations for the series is that I never really felt that I was a person who could explain verbally what I thought all that well. When you have a little more time to think about it and to write it into a piece, then you can explain something as well as you can without having people suffer though you going "uuuhhh" all the time."
When I first viewed the series, I really liked the "every guy's" perspective. But, his audience has more women who watch the episodes. Lev has a couple of theories' why. One is that it's emotionally charged, the other is that women watch them because they want to understand their boyfriends more.
Lev has tried to not try to plan out what he's doing, but rather use a go with the flow approach, "whenever I get the sort of fancy pants idea that I'm doing anything other than pure expression things start to go wrong. When I get too premeditated, things start to go wrong. I just shut that part of my brain off"
