COMICS REVIEW: AN ENTITY OBSERVES ALL THINGS (2015)

by Box Brown

Published by Retrofit/Big Planet Comics in 2015.

. . .

"I'VE GOT TO UPDATE MY PIZZA BLOG!!"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Here, in An Entity Observes All Things, we have a collection of nine satirical short science fiction stories told through the medium of comics in which advanced technologies both answer and create deep seated human desires for power, knowledge, control, and social acclaim. There's also a theme of technology giving people what they want-or what they think they want, or what they've been manipulated to want by social media, big data, corporate marketing campaigns, and so on-even as the supposed fulfillment leaves people in a kind of perpetual stationary jog cycle. 

Fantastical behemoth machines stalk the universe, mind-machine interfaces facilitate full immersion VR gaming as well as direct outside access to private memories, warp speed space flight's enabled, and humans are still hung up on the same old issues: unresolved conflicts with their dead parents; lust for glory; boredom in the face of numbingly repetitious and complex technical tasks; unsustainable resource expenditures; guilt-ridden professional aspirations; the desire to be worshiped as a god-in-the-flesh; the pursuit of immortality; getting stressed out about traveling long distances; the desire for a popular podgrift; the desire for social media brand ubiquity; love of money-same shit, different century, but now with toyetic giant robots. 

The characters are cartoonishly direct in expressing their desires, even within the more candid internal monologue styles of a couple of the stories. It was as if the confessional direct address mode of vloggers had been fully normalized to the point where it's how people communicate with themselves inside their own minds. You're not just marketing yourself to the external audience . . . you're now marketing yourself to yourself. Digitized capitalism now squats within hearts and minds, both rent free and at the dearest price. 

The art style is flat, clean, and whimsically infographic. Each story uses white and two or three other colors. The look is perhaps influenced by NES games; cutesy indie games for PC; nefariously twee trend forecast presentations given inside hip open plan offices; and those cutaway schematics of the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building and Avengers HQ in ye olde tyme Marvel Comics. I was instantly suspicious that I was being sold attractively packaged cereal by a YouTuber, and I think that's part of the intended effect. 

And I want to emphasize that if they made toys and playsets out of the mechs and floating cities and spacecraft featured . . . I would probably want to buy 'em all. That's what's so clever about An Entity Observes All Things: it induces consumer desire even as it unmasks it. Author/artist Box Brown could well be a hipper "Indie" George Lucas in the making, with an army of plastic future soldiers positioned for an epic product marketing blitzkrieg. Time will tell.

COMICS REVIEW: TRASHED (2015)

 Art and words by Derf Backderf 

Editor Charles Kochman

Designer Pamela Notarantonio 

Managing Editor Jen Graham

Production Manager Kathy Lovisolo 

Published by Abrams ComicArts in 2015.

. . .

"Think of the economy as a giant digestive tract. And we're here at the rectum of the free market to clean it all up."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This one's about the life cycle of garbagemen. A guy's living at home post high school. He blew off going to college, because maybe he didn't have the best grades, or maybe he didn't see the point of getting albatrossed with student debt, or a combination of both, so he goes job hunting for that entry level fruit, and soon enough he's hanging on the back of a truck. 

At first he's repulsed by shit-filled diapers, writhing maggots, swarms of flies, dead dogs, and cans filled with liquid waste 'cooked' by the summer sun. But you do the same thing day in, day out, and suddenly it's not such a big deal. You can get used to anything. Sure, the inclement weather sucks. And having to lift heavy-ass pianos and all manner of busted up appliances and machinery is a bum deal-but you're young. You've got body to burn. And the rest of your life to figure out how the fuck to escape your hometown, to escape the life of a garbageman. Maybe you'll even be pushed to take the leap into the void of student loans. Or you could decide to work in sanitation for life. Fuck it, right?

Trashed is a fictional story, but it's backed up by real facts and figures about the ever expanding amount of waste that the USofA's ever growing capitalist economy calls into existence. The working class story of the garbagemen is interwoven with documentary style expositions of the grandiose scale of the landfills required to disappear our All-American super jumbo sized mountains of waste, and the delusions necessary to effect such erasure. Recycling is nice, but insufficient. Our garbage weighs in at triple digits of millions of tons. Styrofoam does not biodegrade. Plastic water bottles reproduce exponentially. Disposible diapers lose none of their allure. Electronic waste production probably already exceeds the human birthrate. To say nothing of improperly disposed dangerous chemicals and industrial byproducts. 

Toxic waste gets through the phony barriers lining the 'fills, and into the water supply. Methane gas accumulates and sparks off now and again into explosions. All the figures are underestimates. Politics and capital distort the truth, thus distorting policy, thus passing the shit-caked buck onto future generations. 

And climate change only makes the summers more extreme. The soup in those trash cans boils ever hotter. Yum-yum.

Author Derf Backderf doesn't hide the grim realities, but he also manages to tell an endearing story. Yes, shit is fucked at the systems level; but the garbagemen are resilient. They see their situation for what it is, and they establish a camaraderie around both their hardships and in knowing the dirty secrets of capitalism. They know the solution is to drastically reduce consumption. All metrics indicate that consumption absolutely must increase for capitalism to maintain life functions. Therefore, consumption increases. And so it goes. Shit is permafucked. 

Backderf uses two page spreads to evoke the reeking grandeur of landfills. He uses cutaway schematics to break down the layers and processes of how garbage accumulates. The mixture of fictional narrative and documentary reminded me of the Scorsese movies Goodfellas and Casino. These movies and this comic book all deal with crooked, destructive processes that have a compelling, almost fateful power to them. Of course, Trashed doesn't suggest that the life of a garbageman has the seductive allure of being a gangster or playing on the house's side of the poker table, but there's something appealing about seeing a side of life most would prefer not to think about, right? Why be a normie consumer asshole when you can be a hip insider, eh?

Trashed shows how municipal waste collection works on the macro scale, but also includes highly localized vignettes about how capitalist erasures are also linked to conservative family values. At one point, our garbagemen are obliged to pick up used condoms and beer cans from a little league playing field so Moms and Dads can go on pretending that their teenagers are perfectly pure and unsullied. Beats funding evidence-based sex education in public schools, y'know? Just throw that shit in the landfill, too, while we're at it!

Lots of gross'n'gritty details: roadkill cleanup; racist co-workers; not-so-secret rightwing Nazi scum campaigning for local elections; walking in tall grass to collect piss bottles thrown out the window by drivers on their way to wherever; the quirky freebies-porno mags, furniture,boots-to which sanitation workers help themselves; crashes, accidents, injuries-Trashed is fun in the way it is told, but the fun comes at a cost.

I kinda want Backderf to do a sequel focused on nuclear waste, but that's probably just me. Backderf would be the cartoonist to do it, tho'. Trashed 2: Goin' Nuclear. It could happen. No, I'm never careful what I wish for . . .

One double page spread basically gives it all away: a four hundred foot deep landfill in which you could bury Cinderella's Castle, the Flatiron Building, Big Ben, and the Statue of Liberty. Except you can't. 'Cause it's filled with garbage. With more on the way. 

So . . . now you know.

Shit is permafucked. 

But at least you know. 

That, I suppose, is the secret glamour of being a garbageman. 

COMICS REVIEW: WINNERS (2015)

 by Anna Ehrlemark

Published by Floating World Comics October 2015.

. . .

"I'm not for the trash yet."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Swirling whiteness giving anguished, uncertain existence to various tortured human forms in lands of shadow.

But no worries: life in the world of Winners is a guaranteed waking hell. If you want to be a winner this world makes you work for it, baby!

A woman is convinced that her sister is an artificial construct assembled by other synthetic people known as 'biosapiens.' She believes very strongly that she is the original-not just the first out of the womb-and that her sister never even gestated. Talk about sibling rivalry!

A sleeping woman's face almost seems to float like a discarded Halloween mask upon a dark river, until she awakes in a hospital bed that swallows her whole. Or does she sink forever into the mattress of her own volition in order to achieve some kind of eternal sleep? 

Yet another pair of sisters seems to have been grown in a lab to appear normal when viewed from behind, but then they have monster faces when they turn around. Or, depending on how you interpret the 'edit' of the panels do these monster faces come bursting out of the backs of their heads? Or did the mad scientists brew up what they intended to be as some kind of 'perfect girl' . . . but then the girls were like 'Fuck it' and manifested monster faces to fight free of being manufactured images?

A desperate, starving homeless man warms himself by a bonfire alongside his unhoused comrades until a helicopter descends from the sky to disgorge a sexy woman in skintight pants with large breasts to whisk the starving man away to a feast of rich people in a skyscraper penthouse. That's it. The other homeless men get left out in the cold. 

Two women have sex inside a giant champagne glass before a live studio audience until one is seemingly dissolved by the force of the other's willpower in some kind of clandestine struggle. Pornography and the gladiatorial are combined by some perverse alchemy. 

Winners all.

This is a world of mutability, jealousy, sadism, competition, paranoia, envy, paradox, oppression, despair, and desperate fantasies of vengeance and/or ludicrous good fortune that makes a mockery of all our notions of meritocracy. 

No reasons are given beyond elemental desires for retribution for harms done and a longing for a freedom from want. 

The visuals are sinuously grotesque. 

It's also quite funny in a sicko way I admire. 

Yes, it's a collection of short-short comic book stories, but it works more like an album of thematically connected songs than an anthology of formulaic narratives. I didn't mind this. 

Appropriately, the climax occurs inside a circus tent . . . but you'll just have to see that part for yourself.

Hey, you want to be a real winner, right?

Gotta put in the work. 

COMICS REVIEW: APOCALYPTIGIRL: AN ARIA FOR THE END TIMES (2015)

Script and Art by Andrew MacLean

...

"You know, for an apocalypse . . . it ain't all bad."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A woman named Aria wanders a post-apocalyptic world with her sword, her guns, and her twitchy tomcat, Jelly Beans, singing French opera, and not having such a bad time of it, really. The scenery is nice. Lots of trees and other plants reclaiming the abandoned office buildings, vehicles, and ruined  infrastructure. Aria lives underground inside an abandoned subway car wired up to a power source, hooked up to clean water, and she's able to harvest all-organic fruits and nuts from the trees all over the surface world. Aria has a motorcycle, and a broken down mech she has all but given up on repairing for the moment. Fresh air, clean water, healthy food, exercise-Aria's seemingly got the run of the planet.

Except for the muscle dudes in blue warpaint wielding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Oh, and the killer hordes of mutant attack dogs. And the blue-skinned lunatics, those dudes are heavy. And then there's the soldiers of the One . . . but you'll just have to check that crew out yourself.

Aria's life is in danger, but she is not scared. She's armed, she has survival skills, combat training, and a mission to find an ultra-tech power source to give her life meaning, since she is completely isolated from meaningful human contact during her time on this planet, aside from her skirmishes with the blue warpaint dudes and the blue-skinned dudes and the soldiers of the One. Only the soldiers of the One seem to speak Aria's language, and so we can perhaps assume that the lack of an ability to communicate only contributes to the tension and hostility that regularly boils over into lethal violence.

During one of Aria's battles with the blue warpaint dudes, she encounters a teenage boy who can't quite pull the trigger on his Kalashnikov. Aria spares his life, and she comes to be haunted by his intense eyes. Later, one of these eyes sheds a tear over a comrade-in-arms slain by Aria in battle.

At eighty-eight pages, Apocalyptigirl keeps things simple and to the point, telling an action-packed story of a post-apocalyptic wanderer contending with a dangerous world in the vein of A Boy and His Dog, The Omega Man, or the first Fallout game. The art is charming, colorful, slightly cartoony, and brutally violent where necessary. Bodies are blown apart in shootouts. Limbs get hacked off. Aria is not to be fucked with despite her sunny, borderline twee demeanor. The thing which Aria is trying to find is cool looking, but is basically a MacGuffin, just a device to give some semblance of a structure to the plot. I would've preferred a more interesting object for her to quest after, but it doesn't ruin anything. I was particularly pleased with the ending, which I did not expect. There is an intriguing subtext of a society divided along gender lines, with the apocalypse implied to be the outcome of militaristic hypermasculinity gone berserk, but the emphasis is on the action, and the details of Aria's solitary existence. Apocalyptigirl isn't preachy, but it does have more on its mind than is obvious on a first reading.

Overall, Apocalyptigirl gets by almost entirely on the charm and dynamism of its visuals, which is no mean feat. I read it several times over an evening, and I have since ruminated over its visuals, thinking, "What a cozy apocalypse! I would buy the RPG sourcebook. I want to wander this wasteland myself." There's a lot to enjoy within this slim volume. A lot of comics go on and on, to diminishing returns over time. I like it when everything you need is in one volume, between two covers, no bullshit, just the thing itself.

living skeleton actor fuck (7/24/15 version)

living skeleton actor fuck

by William D. Tucker

role puts flesh and guts and blood on me

it used to make me feel complete

now it makes me feel heavy, arbitrary, old,

like I was never quite here

it’s fuckin’ weird

Because

I have all the evidence in the world

that I was here

never really went away

never gave up

but, uh, I dunno.

the feeling inside

does not change

a lot of work,

a lot of awards,

a lot of love from all over the world

but it’s, uh, it’s definitely a king of shreds and patches kinda deal

yeah . . .

. . . multiple past personas inhabiting my body at an advanced age . . .

OVERCROWDING OF PERSONAS

My head is thick with Personas-I won’t lie . . .

but for my next project

very stripped down

just the bones

black box theatre

no vocal chords, lips, tongue, lungs,

none of that.

maybe just have the air conditioning cranked up to the max

with, like, the script in front of the vent

breeze will lift the text off the page

let the words whisper right through me . . .

heh,

won’t that be something?

-May-July 2015

Copyright 2015 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission.