Mark Ernst - A Week of Kindness

Analysis of A Week of Kindness

First panel - A gypsy woman is dancing on the street with a chicken standing one-legged on a ball with a nebulous-looking form above its head. A circular tray of what looks like about thirty eggs lay on the cobble-stone street, the background inhabited by a building wall and part of a stairway. The chicken could be transforming, but there is something about this moment that is eerie and special.

Second panel - A giant hybrid bird-like man stands over an unconscious woman laying on a table in a room (possibly the same gypsy?), his head of a chicken, but his legs a man's, with giant bird wings hanging. A chicken stands beside him on the ground. The room appears to be a kitchen or dining room of some sort, with a fancy bookcase and two hanging candle-lit chandeliers in the background. From the first panel on, roosters are in each panel in some way.

Third panel - The same chicken-man hybrid, but now with more metallic-looking wings, stands off with a rooster-hybrid man of the same sort, and now we see that the upper body is that of the animal and the lower body fades into human, beginning with a man's vest partly down the chest. This darker rooster is carrying what looks like a gas lamp. They are on opposite sides of a pit with a woman laying in it, seemingly dead, but peaceful, a nude angel carrying flurrying cloth behind the pit she lays in with a stone alter and candles lit on it, implying the inside of a church.

Fourth panel - The two hybrid animal-men seem to be mourning over the pit, crouched down at the foot together, the nude figure laying on the stone tablet cover of the tomb. The background is evidently a church, as seen by the enormous stone archways, roman pillars with nude religious-looking figures, and saints engraved in stone on above-ground stone tombs behind them. A top-hat lays on the ground behind the white rooster-hybrid, and a small, simplistic-looking tree appears to be sprouting from the pit's grave, though from the angle, the reader cannot see the woman in the pit anymore. The dark rooster-man is holding a cloth, possibly the cloth of the angel (that is the nude woman laying on the stone tablet) that was unraveled. Both rooster-men have folded their wings in, or in the white rooster's case, appear to be doing so in the panel, and are in their suits again.

Fifth panel - A woman who appears to be in her night-gown is laying face-down in her own pool of blood, her bed-sheets still tangled around her. The bed to the left is lumpy and disturbed, a rooster standing on top of the covers. Another rooster stands up front of the panel, partly in front of the injured woman, and a hybrid chicken-man, now in a suit and without his wings, stands in the open doorway. Curtains drape from the large bed and over an inlet room in the background with a water pot sitting on a table before an oval mirror on the wall. The room seems decadent, the rooster raising his arms and tilting his head back, his beak open to the sky as if in either jubilance or horror.

Sixth panel - A woman in a nice 18th-century dress appears entranced by a man in a suit as he dances before her in a living room, a large fire-place in the background, and a stone decorated wall-column behind him. The rooster-man hybrid peeks from behind the stone column, seemingly coming out of the wall to spy on or watch the man.

Overall, the story has repeating elements such as the woman, a man in a suit, the roosters, and the hybrid rooster-men, but the story is ambiguous and hard to follow. The reader tries to connect the panels and make sense of them. The sequence and ordering of this sequence of panels leaves a lot open.

These panels were compiled through collage, then photographed to flatten the collage elements. Mark Ernst was the first to use collage.