The Divided States of Hysteria (2017): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin: Legendary comic writer-artist Howard Chaykin stirred up controversy when The Divided States of Hysteria came out in single-issue form in 2017.
Much of the flack came from the Left, an odd turn of events because Chaykin is vocally left-wing and has been for decades. But he's also been an expert at making readers uncomfortable for decades now.
For example, he caused the late Harlan Ellison to have a world-class freak-out with his revisionist Shadow miniseries in the mid-1980's, a book which logically pointed out that the Shadow was a fascist sociopath and then ran with it all the way to awesomeness.
The Divided States of Hysteria is a near-future dystopia in which much of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government died in a terrorist attack before the book's narrative begins. Rather than offer a bipartisan fantasy of a perfect President within this scenario, as Designated Survivor does, Chaykin instead offers more chaos, horror, incompetence, and a group of "heroes" who make the Dirty Dozen look about as scary as the goddam Goonies.
At the heart of a lot of complaints, I think, is Chaykin's ability to make violence and fascist tendencies look attractive. It's sort of the point -- as some wag once pointed out, a lot of comic-book superheroes are fascistic, anti-government sociopaths. Or would be, if they were real. But isn't fun to watch them solve things with punches and explosions?
At the heart, though, of those complaints is also the inability of many people, left or right, to separate the representation of something from advocacy of that same thing, along with a a pronounced and escalating ability to take offense at anything that isn't pablum. Bland, inoffensive pablum. You're mean, Early! How dare you draw the aftermath of a completely plausible 21st-century American lynching AND PUT IT ON YOUR COVER!
Identity politics also requires that one of the two people closest to being a hero in The Divided States of Hysteria, as a trans woman, SHOULD NOT BE REPRESENTED BY A HETEROSEXUAL WHITE MALE CARTOONIST!!!
But she is a great character. And dead sexy.
At one point, female terrorists detonate dirty bombs they've had implanted in their wombs. This is not a pretty scenario. I imagine Tom Clancy vomiting with rage somewhere. So too someone on the Left. Chaykin has decided to find ways to horrify the reader, and the same old beheadings and IED attacks and marathon bombings have lost the power to shock. They're becoming background noise.
In order to stop America's enemies -- and redeem his own devastated reputation, and avenge the deaths of his mistress and wife and family in a terrorist attack -- a disgraced CIA operative puts together a team of four convicted murderers. They're up against a cadre of terrorist leaders and a Russian operative and the incompetence of their own country's government. The President they're working for, a replacement from the Cabinet's lowest levels, is a compromised hack.
So five misfits.... well, 'misfit' is a bit of a misnomer. Besides our CIA protagonist, our heroes are a trans man who killed three clients in self-defence, a mob hitman with a serial-killing hobby, a criminal accountant who murdered a couple of dozen rich people with poison, and an African-American serial-killing sniper who's a really good shot and loves shooting white civilians in the head.
The Challengers of the Unknown these are not. Challengers of the Unthinkable, maybe.
The violence is horrifying. The art is slick and gorgeous and horrifyingly clinical at atimes. The 'sound-design' from letterer Ken Bruzenak is fascinating enough that it gets its own 4-page explanatory essay at the back of the volume. Over it all hangs a question Chaykin has been asking and answering for a long time in his work -- are these the heroes you want? Because this is what they would really look like.
I mean, there are other questions. And the whole thing, complete with the cynical 'voice' of an omniscient narrator running along with the narrative, is a compelling action narrative, blood-soaked and morally dubious. But it's also a compelling examination of the heroism people love when it's sanitized in everything from James Bond movies to daily news reports of Seal Team 6 and Our Brave Black Ops Boys in Afghanistan.
And I haven't even delved into the sexual and racial politics explored throughout! The Divided States of America delves into an America besotted with sex and violence, sometimes at the same time, sometimes as the same thing.
Along with the narration comes a recurring series of images of death and horror from various American sites. The terrorist groups themselves are a mixed bag too -- an All-Star, Dream Team-up of White Supremacy and Black Power and Islamicism, coordinated by a Russian operative who's also a Hollywood movie producer. It's doom alone that counts, all moving towards a final attack on a telethon for a wounded America, complete with the President, to be destroyed by the same groups who are also the event's public donors.
It's not so much that the satire and the violence both blister. It's that the entire book seems entirely plausible. Chaykin's been examining the puritanical, pornographic nature of American culture for decades. The American love of violence as a solution, and the attendant separation of the world into Good and Evil, Us and Them. Now all accompanied by the eternal chatter of social media.
Bang bang, screw screw, shoot shoot. Highly recommended.
Saga Volume 1 (2012-2013/ Collected 2015): written by Brian K. Vaughan; illustrated by Fiona Staples: Saga has become something of a sales sensation since its first appearance. It's the sort of half-dippy, star-spanning science-fantasy tale that owes more to allegory than astronomy.
A race of horned aliens and a race of winged aliens have been at war across the galaxy for millennia. They've outsourced the business of war to many other races in a variety of places. But two soldiers from the opposing sides have fallen in love. And she's pregnant. And a galaxy-wide hunt has been kicked off to find them.
If you require hard science fiction, or at least scientifically plausible science fiction, avoid Saga. The first volume is fun and breezy in that often anomalously snarky Buffy the Vampire Slayer way, though both the writing and the pleasant artwork from Fiona Staples rapidly evaporate in one's memory. Maybe you'll enjoy it more. A volume made semi-famous by an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which the nerds get all hot and bothered by the mother breast-feeding her baby on the cover. Yeah, hubba hubba. Losers. Lightly recommended.
Plastic Man: On the Lam!: written and illustrated by Kyle Baker (2004/ Collected 2004): Kyle Baker's brilliant, hilarious run on Plastic Man begins here. He won the comics industry Eisner Award for best new series back in 2004 for his take on the Golden Age's stretchable FBI agent. That didn't keep the book from being cancelled after 20 issues despite it getting a rave review from Entertainment Weekly as well.
But you should buy this. Really, you should buy anything by Baker. He's a swell writer-artist, never sweller than when he's writing his own stuff. He can draw pretty much any way he wants to, though the fallback on Plastic Man is anarchic cartooning that pays homage to Plastic Man creator Jack Cole's zany work even as it also nods to a host of other influences, including Warner Brothers cartoons.
One of the ten or 15 greatest things DC Comics has published in the 21st century, it even manages to make its metacriticism of superhero tropes and stereotypes and oddities specific without being an in-joke inaccessible to non-expert comic-book readers. The Baker Plastic Man deserves an Absolute hardcover edition, stat! Highly recommended.
Airboy: written by James Robinson; illustrated by Greg Hinkle (2015): James Robinson's comic-book writing career has been distinguished by many superhero series, most notably the Cold War Justice Society miniseries The Golden Age and his terrific, lengthy run on his legacy version of the Golden-Age DC hero Starman, the reluctantly heroic son of that now-retired hero.
Here, Robinson takes the almost-forgotten Golden-Age comic-book aviator Airboy into the realm of metafictional, quasi-autobiographical, scatological satire.
And it's terrific. To describe too much would spoil things. But suffice to say that versions of Robinson and artist Greg Hinkle are characters along with Airboy and friends. But 'Robinson' is drug-and-alcohol-addled, self-destructive, and despondent over what he feels is his failed career as a writer. Poor old Hinkle and his gigantic, often-displayed penis come along for a story session that turns into a Bacchanal that turns into a trip into the realms of comic-book-land.
It's very funny, completely NSFW, and politically incorrect -- a scandal erupted over Robinson's use of trans characters early in the series, though the last issue recontextualizes that use in such a way that the complaints seem to be fully addressed. That didn't stop Robinson from having to issue an apology/justification before the last issue ever came out. So it goes. This is terrific stuff in terms of both Robinson's writing and Hinkle's funny, cartoony, and often grotesque cartooning. Highly recommended.
Judgment Day: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Rob Liefeld, Gil Kane, and others (1997/Collected 2003): One of those Alan 'Watchmen' Moore-penned volumes from the 1990's that always seem vaguely anomalous, coming as they do from Moore's time writing for Rob Liefeld's 'wing' of Image Comics that would spin off into its own separate publishing company during Moore's time writing for a couple of the Image 'wings.' This one involves Liefeld's superhero team Youngblood, there from the beginning of Image Comics in 1992. Moore's job seems to be to give the whole thing a veneer of artsiness unknown to Liefeld's output. Well, if not artsiness than at least metafictionality.
The best parts of this series, which see a member of Youngblood put on trial for murder, involve flashbacks drawn by various artists. Most of the flashbacks are pastiches, often satiric in tone and content, of decades of comic-book titles and characters, from Old West heroes to Conan the Barbarian adaptations. And the whole plot revolves around a magical book that seems to prefigure Moore's really metafictional work in his own later title, Promethea. Moore was winning writing awards for his work on Liefeld's Superman homage Supreme at the same time, and Supreme shows up here as well.
The whole thing goes down pretty smoothly, with some nice artwork -- especially that of Grandmaster Gil Kane on a couple of sections. This volume is both a curiosity and a harbinger of Moore work to come. Exaggerated claims of Watchmen-level relevance in the publisher's foreword do seem both forced and gormless -- superheroes have been put on trial in one way or another prior to Judgment Day, from Batman in the 1940's to the Justice Society of America in the 1980's. Liefeld's art contributions are unusually awful and off-model at certain points -- his version of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon is especially off, but the book is rife with characters with weird, up-turned nostrils and tiny, tiny feet. Recommended.
Spawn: Origins Volume 1: written and illustrated by Todd McFarlane (1992/ Collected 2009): Canadian writer-artist Todd McFarlane left Marvel Comics in 1992 along with five other creators to create creator-owned comic company Image. McFarlane, a popular Marvel artist on Spider-man and Hulk, soon launched Spawn. It rapidly became Image's best-selling title. Moreover, it became the best-selling superhero comic in North America for a few years, helping break the hold DC and Marvel had on the comic-book-buying public.
If you want to see what the fuss was about, these relatively recently released Spawn: Origins volumes are the way to go if you can find them remaindered. And boy, have I seen them remaindered for up to 80% off cover-price. They're certainly enjoyable in a pulpy way. McFarlane's greatest strength as an artist lies in full-page and double-page spreads; his weakness lies in panel-to-panel continuity, which sometimes degenerates to incomprehensibility. But the spreads are great. So too Spawn's cape and chains, which are less costume elements than they are design elements on a page.
McFarlane isn't much of a writer, but it's at least competent superhero schlock. Spawn is basically a Marvel hero whose reasons to be angsty have been turned up to 11. A former heroic CIA Black Ops soldier, Al Simmons was killed by one of his own compatriots on the job under orders from his superior. Now he's back from the dead. Well, sort of. Really, he's still dead. He's just ambulatory and has super-powers. But he's also partially amnesiac. He's been gone for five years. And he owes Hell... something. Oh, and under his costume (which is actually a living supernatural symbiote), he looks like a mummy who stayed in the oven too long. Good times! And his widow married his best friend! And both Heaven and Hell keep trying to kill him! And he lives with a bunch of homeless people in New York's Bowery! Oh, Spawn. Spawn Agonistes! Recommended.
Spawn: Origins Volume 2: written and illustrated by Todd McFarlane with writing by Alan Moore and Frank Miller (1992-93/ Collected 2009): Todd McFarlane started to bring in guest writers with the issues collected in this second volume. Two issues that chronologically should appear herein but don't also included guest writers -- Neil Gaiman on one issue that would lead to more than a decade of legal battles between Gaiman and McFarlane, and Dave Sim on a metafictional odyssey co-starring his talking aardvark Cerebus.
We do get Alan Moore and Frank Miller riffing on Spawn in issues that are much better written than McFarlane's efforts. So it goes. The whole volume entertains, McFarlane's art is very strong, and we get a storyline continued from the previous volume featuring antagonist Overtkill, one of the two or three most stupidly named super-characters of that baroque early 1990's age of super-powered characters with increasingly stupid names and increasingly cluttered costumes. Recommended.
Savage Dragon Archives Volume 1: written and illustrated by Erik Larsen (1992-94; collected 2006): Savage Dragon continues to run as a monthly today, more than twenty years after it was one of the first books from fledgling comics line Image, formed by artists who'd left Marvel because they wanted to own their own characters. Indeed, it's the only one of those first books that has maintained continuous publication, which is quite a testament to creator/writer/artist Erik Larsen.
Savage Dragon follows the adventures of a green-skinned, amnesiac, super-powered fellow with a foot-tall fin on his head. Recruited to help Chicago police deal with an overabundance of super-powered criminals, Officer Dragon soon becomes sought after across the U.S. as a reliable bulwark against super-criminals.
It's fun to watch Larsen grow as a writer and an artist over the first two years of the book collected here. The black-and-white reprint format makes an early tendency towards over-rendering quite clear -- a number of early one- and two-page splashes are nearly incomprehensible in black-and-white thanks to a plethora of lines.
Larsen has already self-corrected by the end of the run, though, as his art gets pleasingly more cartoony (Dragon looks less and less over-muscledly realistic and more and more like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon). The influences of artists like Frank Miller, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and perhaps Alex Toth start to show in an art style that more effectively uses fewer lines, suggestiveness, and solid blacks.
The writing develops as well, the story becoming twistier and more capable of surprise the further along one goes. There are some nice plot twists, some effective characterization, and an increasingly effective ability to make fights scenes seem necessary to the storyline, and not simply de rigeur. A good time. Recommended.
