COMICS REVIEW: SP4RX (2016)

Written and drawn by Wren McDonald

Published by Nobrow in 2016.

. . .

“I thought you didn’t give a shit?”

“I don’t. Now let’s get to it.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Between two covers on one hundred sixteen pages of paper and in black, white, and two shades of purple we find ourselves in the near future dystopian mega tower of Avalon-a city rigidly divided by class. Much like in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the capitalist overlords occupy the heights, the squishy middle management’s just below that, and below them you have the zero mobility wage slaves-and below them you have the subterranean layer just for the criminals, militants, and homeless folks. From the outlaw depths emerges SP4RX a mercenary cyborg superhacker with a mean streak who despises fools and fuck-ups. SP4RX is consciously focused on two things: kicking ass and getting paid. His unarticulated third passion is for his best friend and roommate CL1PP3R, a more easygoing cyborg street doctor who specializes in diagnostics and maintenance for the heavily modded hacker underground. The restless SP4RX likes adventure, hates failure, and prides himself on his hyper-competence. CL1PP3R is totally at ease with himself, loves nothing more than being plugged into virtual reality, and rarely goes outdoors. 

SP4RX is one of those stories where you have an angry mercenary hero who doesn’t give a fuck . . . until he sorta gives a fuck. SP4RX is intriguing in that he is focused on externals-combat, money, vengeance against people he doesn’t respect-but his journey leads him to an unexpectedly internal destination. SP4RX explores themes of competency and efficiency by pitting a ruthless mercenary against a growing horde of brainwashed employees of an evil corporation. Free will seems to be the difference between SP4RX and his enemies, but even he seems to be fated by his perfectionism to transcend his draggy meats in order to merge with cyberspace. In an amusing irony, SP4RX drives himself harder than any corporate master ever could.

SP4RX is eventually recruited by one of them thar rebel underground type outfits. The Star Wars vibes even include an adorbs toyetic robot sidekick.

The climatic mission involves penetrating a convoluted enemy base while blasting cannon fodder bad guys. Yep, it’s got one of those.

What I liked best was how mean and antisocial SP4RX is-the dude rampages against copbots and brainwashed employees and even steals a motorcycle on a whim. He smokes cigarettes. He’s got this robotic left arm that serves as a hydraulic ram, lockpick, and cigarette lighter all-in-one. He’s got a de rigeur Neuromancer/Ghost in the Shell cyberbrain to plug his consciousness into cyberspace. He also has no problem telling people he doesn’t respect to get fucked. SP4RX is ironically optimized to conquer a shitass lousy world he despises. Now, this isn’t really in the spirit of Neuromancer, since Gibson’s vision is far more humanistic. Gibson’s characters prevail to the degree that they resist total mechanization. SP4RX is born of a more callous age that feels congruent with both the police state Machiavellianism of Ghost in the Shell and Neo Gilded Age America in the back half of the 2010s: mean, stupid, greedy, obsessed with technology, always online, strung out on every kind of drug, hypersexual yet anhedonic, heavily armed, and self-destructive.

Much of what transpires here is familiar, but the commentary on work/life imbalance in the gig economy age of hustle and grind is on point. There’s also great world-building featuring lots of posthuman architecture. I especially liked the squalid, tightly packed VR parlor that SP4RX visits in the depths of his alienation. SP4RX’s technological dystopia replaces human intimacy with absorbing, fully monetized virtuality at every turn: fuckbots, full immersion brainlink fantasias, and corporatized media shilling greener grass lifestyle pornography in lieu of actual information.

SP4RX is an example of a creator-owned genre exercise done well. Writer/artist Wren McDonald isn’t pulling out his guts for some indie autobiographical masterpiece on this one. This isn’t Harvey Pekar or Alison Bechdel or Dave Sim. Wren is doing what he wants with a cyberpunk saga of an antisocial mercenary hacker fighting to survive in a world he never made. This isn’t the literary, densely ironic cyberpunk of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Count Zero, or Mona Lisa Overdrive, but rather the action-oriented highly processed fructose corn syrup cyberpunk of GURPS, Mike Pondsmith, Shadowrun tie-in novels, Robert Longo’s film of Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic, and the Albert Pyun flick Nemesis. SP4RX is focused on kicking maximum ass spiked with some Robocop/Starship Troopers style Media Break-esque satirical asides. It goes down easy and leaves you with a memorable aftertaste. Overall, it’s one more exhibit in the case for the superiority of an actual human creator over a corporation or an AI even if it’s just for entertainment purposes.

COMICS REVIEW: DAD'S WEEKEND (2016)

 by Pete Toms 

Published by Hic and Hoc in 2016.

. . .

"I had this dream one time where I hung myself with my own DNA strand."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This-Dad's Weekend-is 24 pages of dialogue-driven comics evoking the depressing truth of how living in  cyber-reality makes insufferable children of us all. Doesn’t matter how old you are, how young, how smart, how creative. Internet pushes a glowing god-finger deep into the pleasure centers of your brain to induce non-stop chemical rewards for the overshares, the hype, the exhalations of rancid conspiritosis, the hot takes. It's not about money or fame, even. Dad's Weekend takes as given the internalization of online discourse, and spins its yarn from that basis.

Our protag is a young woman named Whitney. She's between high school and college. She's smart enough to know that adult life is one of drudgery fully albatrossed by oppressive student loan debt. The only relief shall come from prescription medications and the virtualized sense of belonging to be found on social media. If she were a dude, she would be socially authorized to be an asshole who quotes Fight Club and yammers at length about various unlikely film projects. Kinda like one of her IRL male frenemies who pops up to monologue like a weirdo from an unauthorized sequel to Slacker. 

(In fairness, the guy doesn't directly invoke Fight Club, but give him a few more panels . . .)

Whitney's spending a weekend with her father, a middle-aged conspiracy theorist who obsessively posts embarrassing videos of himself and his deranged speculations on YouTube. As the story goes on, his breakages with reality put him in conflict with avatars of other sketchy systems of reality organization: a priest, a cop . . . Whitney's dad gets into some deep shit here. 

Whitney herself interfaces reality through a set of problematic filters: pop culture tropisms, ironic detachment, the memes, uncompromising cynicism . . . but can you blame her? Internet is the Oracle of our times, reflecting back at us our own subjective truths. Whitney's working off the basis of her experiences of a world of endemic misogyny, racism, and a self-cannibalizing infotainment Blob that amoebically expands and eats up all bandwidth Tetsuo-Shima-style 'til only a singularity of distraction and economic determinism remains. 

But Dad's Weekend keeps it lively. It's funny. The visuals have a tenderness that suggest the human frailty that frightens people into donning the mecha suits of church, state, consumerism, and/or conspiracy theories. The dialogue is sharp. There’s an impressive reveal from Whitney's dad at the end where he confesses the ecstatic terror of fatherhood. But his confession only confirms what Whitney had already pieced together for herself. And his cyclical breakages from reality will, perhaps, only continue apace. 

MOVIE REVIEW: ARRIVAL (2016)

Arrival

Based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang

Starring

Amy Adams

Jeremy Renner

Forest Whitaker

Michael Stuhlbarg

Tzi Ma

Mark O’Brien

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay by Eric Heisserer

Music by Johan Johannsson

Cinematography by Bradford Young

Edited by Joe Walker

“Don’t let it end this way…”

-Klingon Chancellor Gorkon’s (David Warner) dying words in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

“Holy fuck . . .”

-Ian (Jeremy Renner) in the film Arrival (2016)

A woman, a new mother (Amy Adams) speaks to us in poetry about time, and loss, and mortality. We see a life in fast forward-birth to death-a young daughter’s life cut short, in fact, leaving a divorced, bereaved mother to pick up the pieces and soldier forward with her life as a college professor. She is absorbed into her daily routine, as she walks through a university common area where students and staff cluster around a giant flatscreen. When she gets into the lecture hall, most of her students are absent, and those that are present are glued to their screens. She asks what’s up. A student answers by requesting the professor to tune the flatscreen to a news channel …

Strange objects-designated ‘shells’ by the US government-manifest in the skies over twelve human nations all across the Earth. They have no visible means of propulsion, and emit no waste products measurable by Earthling science. The shells look like slices off some titanic, impossibly hard alien fruit, or maybe the shavings off some monstrous carving. They just hang in the sky, defying all our physics, no doubt provoking hack cable news pundits to make references to H.G. Wells,  the Sword of Damocles, maybe out-of-context (mis)quotations from the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations.

One of the twelve shells has touched down in Montana. The US Army mobilizes to throw up a security/quarantine perimeter around the alien object. A secret effort is made to attempt to communicate with whatever intelligence lies within the shell ...

Soon enough, the woman from the cryptic opening is further delineated within her professional context: Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) of the US Army gets in touch with linguist and college professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), whose mastery of human languages in both theory and practice makes her a vital asset to the US’s Forever Wars on Terror. Colonel Weber, abruptly visiting her office in civvies with an armed escort, makes a terse, complimentary reference to their previous collaboration involving translations from Farsi: “You made short work of those insurgent videos.” Dr. Banks says, “You made short work of those insurgents.” Her solemn tone evokes a sense of betrayal-she didn’t sign on to be a cog in a killing machine. But when Colonel Weber offers her a chance to work on translating what may be an extraterrestrial language-the faltering initial gambit of First Contact between humanity and an intelligent alien species-she jumps at the chance.

Dr. Banks is, after some runaround by the government, inducted into a secret operation to communicate with the alien beings inside the shells. Banks is paired with Ian (Jeremy Renner) an astrophysicist. They are overseen by Weber and the deeply suspicious, but intellectual, CIA agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg). Dr. Banks and Ian are paired up to work on the problem of communication with extraterrestrials from the differing perspectives of language and mathematics. After some initial discussion of the differences between the soft science of linguistics and the hard science of numbers, Dr. Banks and Ian, consummate professionals who respect each other, get to work on the essential question to be posed to the aliens: “What are you doing on Earth?”

Meanwhile, human societies lose their shit. What’s left of it. Especially here in the USofA: food riots; mass suicides by a religious cult; the National Guard is deployed to maintain order through force; conspiracy mongering by online socially mediated echo chambers stokes fear and distrust of science; talking heads of corporatist Neoliberal media outlets churning out sensationalist pseudo-scientific talking head chatter dilute the information ecology; and, through it all, the very worst human instincts are aided and abetted by online right-wing, Neo-Fascist, and white supremacist disinformation ops. Ignorance, fear, anti-intellectualism, nationalism, racism, and late stage capitalist distortion of reality for infotainment, profit, and fuel purposes derange the human species’ collective capacity for communication and collaboration. Suspicion is also generated by the secretive efforts by national governments to keep their efforts to communicate with the shells under wraps.

Dr. Banks and Ian feel the pressure from Weber and Halpern to force results by cutting corners on scientific rigor within the security culture bubble thrown up to maintain US supremacy, even as other nations compete to be the first to crack the alien riddle. China, led by the hawkish General Shang (Tzi Ma), is the primary rival to the US. Nuclear armed, paranoid nation states all in thrall to doctrines of national supremacy, all trying to be first to decide whether to slaughter the aliens or forge a way to the negotiation table. It’ll all work out in the end-won’t it?

Director Villeneuve crafts a sci-fi film as visually and sonically rigorous and mysterious as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while weaving  in human emotions of loss, longing, wonder, despair, paranoia, anger, hatred,  and desperation. This is science fiction which is grounded in the central performance of Amy Adams, with the special effects as a support, contra Kubrick’s masterwork which casts human beings as specks within the cosmos. Humanity, however imperfect, has to reckon with its own agency as citizens of the cosmos in Arrival, whereas in 2001 humanity is at the whims of vast, alien powers manipulating our evolutionary history for unknowable purposes.

A major theme is the peril of communication between past and future both within ourselves as individual sentient beings with complex memories, and on the level of a human planetary society making a faltering first attempt at hailing an utterly alien intelligence and the redefinition of human identity that entails. Another theme is disorientation: the movie begins with a montaged depiction of Dr. Banks’s daughter’s birth-life-death which gives no hint of the first contact saga to come. But the grief and loss within Dr. Banks partially drives her mission to communicate with the aliens. When the human communications team first enters the central chamber of an alien shell, they are subject to weird gravity effects, and a key shot is framed upside down hammering home the idea of losing all human moorings when coming into the presence of the truly alien.

It would be criminal for me to spoil this movie any further. Part of Arrival’s power comes from the process of discovery. This is one of those movies you’re just going to have to see for yourself, Dear Reader. It’s a smart film about ideas, emotions, and high stakes conflicts. It is the rare science fiction film that functions at the same level of sophistication as science fiction literature. Think 2001, Gattaca, Solaris, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. Arrival will pop up on lists of the greatest sci-fi movies in years to come. Try to see it on the biggest, brightest screen possible, with the sound cranked to the max.