Five By Five - Comics, week 4: Local

So the boy, in his infinite wisdom, has recently decided that we need to be more organised. For him, our current filing system of sticking paperwork down the side of the computer is lacking a certain level of razor sharp practicality, despite the hours of fun and hilarity when we need to find an important document quickly. And apparently, my adherence to the ‘mental’ shopping list school of thought is not enough to convince him of the inferiority of the paper and pen version.

I’ve been going along with his efficiency drive with a certain degree of reluctance to be honest, being at least a theoretical fan of creative mess, but he knows me well. And he’s found just the tool to drag me over to the administrative dark side.

The hardback graphic novel is a beautiful artefact and a welcome addition to any collection! 

Imagine if you will, a gleaming expanse of white, glistening in the September sunshine like a fresh fall of snow. Affixed to the wall like a window through which you might see pretty much anything, is our brand new whiteboard, complete with pens heady with the tang of planning and schedules and industrial strength solvents.

The thing is, it’s almost impossible to resist the allure of a clean slate. The chance to do things right this time around, mistakes rubbed out, virgin territory to shape after our own perfect visions.

It’s a desire that I can’t help but think Megan McKeenan, anti-heroine of graphic novel Local, might be rather familiar with. The story follows her through twelve years of fresh starts as she flits from city to city trying on identities for herself as often as Kate Moss changes her outfit.

Meet Megan, the perpetual runaway...

Megan is a perpetual runaway. And when the mistakes she makes tangle her current situation too much, she simply bails, ready to start again with a different picture. Each part of her twelve piece story stands in glorious isolation, yet the thread of her own true self ties it all together and anchors the narrative for us. In some pieces, she takes centre stage. In others she is little more than a bit part, peripheral to her own life.

But is it any good?

Well, yes actually.

Megan is an anti-heroine because of her quite startling capacity to fuck things up. She gropes blindly for human connection, sulking like a spurned child in a school playground when her erstwhile room-mate seemingly rejects her overtures of friendship, yet she also goes out of her way to sabotage the relationships that do come her way. Megan lies, bitches and self-obsesses her way through each frame. Yet, and you’re going to have to trust me on this one, she is still somehow likeable.

Trust me, she is still somehow likeable!

Maybe it’s because her mistakes are our mistakes, albeit in microsm. If you’ve ever been uncertain about what you want, treated a lover badly, or let your own problems blind you to other people’s then it’s pretty hard to judge Megan too harshly because she recognizes her shortcomings and keeps trying regardless. One of the most powerful vignettes of the book comes as Megan’s intermittent postcards to her young cousin float voice-over style as we witness his adolescent self-destruction. Her well intentioned advice is rendered meaningless in the face of the harsh realities of life; an uncompromising reminder than you can’t simply phone in love and support.

And as Megan keeps running, she slowly comes to realise that it isn’t just the weather that you take with you everywhere you go. Her problems pursue her, and so ultimately do the people she tries and fails to connect with. Things climax when all of the ghosts from her past catch up with her at once as she finally picks a place in which to stand, fight or fall.

In some pieces, she takes centre stage. In others she is little more than a bit part, peripheral to her own life.

On some levels, Local is a straightforward story about a young woman’s attempts to find her place in the world, but if you like a little more symbolism in your comics you won’t be disappointed. Keys feature heavily; in particular the key that Megan carries around her neck as a reminder of the first home she ever flees and the mother whose dreams she comes to embody. Similarly photographs and other objects of sentimental value occur and recur, the outward detritus of human emotion. In a disturbing segue, Megan strikes up a relationship of sorts with a boy who steals her keys to leave pictures of himself in her apartment, quite literally physically asserting himself within her life.

Visually, Local is stark; gritty even. People matter, with faces in particular vividly drawn though rarely romanticised. The look of it somehow serves to reinforce the feelings of isolation and yearning that Megan experiences. It’s also something that is not quite a love letter to the USA itself… there’s a wary affection for the cities that feature but it’s worth noting that it’s only in rural America that Megan finally finds any kind of peace with herself.

Note the key around her neck, Local is full of symbolism relating to keys...

Ultimately, we all want what Megan wants. To be sure that we are living the life we are supposed to, rather than allowing our mistakes to divert us into boxes that don’t fit. Her wanderings are a metaphorical echo of our own false starts and reinventions. But she has the key to her true home all along. We should all be so lucky.

This week, Kate Townshend is guzzling Pimms while there is still time!

Five By Five - Comics, week 3: Phonogram

Last weekend, because I am both rock and roll and hardcore, I went to a nightclub with the express intention of losing myself in the music. (Eminem references: I’m still totally down with the kids).

I know what you’re thinking: Me and several hundred thousand other people right? Pubbing and clubbing on a Saturday night is pretty much a great British pass time; so much so that it has its own associated mini-rituals (even if they do primarily involve a donner kebab and a friend willing to hold your hair back for you as you weep into the gutter about the sheer existentialist absurdity of your own right shoe. Or is that just me?)

The truth is, fast food, projectile vomiting and girls who think that layers of fake tan are an acceptable alternative to clothes too often define nights out. We all want that transcendental moment when the DJ really does save your life, but it’s rare, and dependent on a magical alignment of people and place and beat.

It’s possible though, which is why we return to these sticky floored churches week after week in the hope that God will eventually show up.

The idea of it is endlessly compelling, and this week’s graphic novel series Phonogram takes it even further, as an entire pantheon shimmer and echo around the festivals, nightclubs and other music venues of the UK.

Phonogram takes place in a universe very much like our own; except that music really is magic here, and it chooses its own acolytes, sometimes without a great deal of discrimination. It might seem like an odd thing to say, but barely pages into ‘Rue Britannia’, the first offering in the series, I was as sure that I loved the story as I was that I hated the protagonist; pretentious, chain smoking David Kohl.

Of course, hate can be a complex emotion, and Kohl is a character with self-knowledge if nothing else, combined with an acute awareness of the powerful and ambivalent responses he can elicit. In possession of a strange mix of angst-ridden self-loathing and a misogynist’s swagger he declares himself a ‘white man in clitoris palace’ at the start of the story...

Before a well-timed and satisfying ass-kicking from a goddess.

Deities abound here and the metaphors are thick, fast and not always subtle. They don’t feel clumsy or forced though, because so many of the ideas they give form to have a ring of truth about them. From the fallen goddess of Brit Pop (once great, now best left buried), to the ‘memory palaces’ built from our collective impressions of a time, a place, a musical zeitgeist, Phonogram works because music is so close to metaphor anyway. A bunch of carefully arranged vibrations shouldn’t be able to make us laugh or cry or want to get laid. But they totally do. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from here to giving these vibrations form and personality. And of course, we’re all slaves to the music sometimes. It’s just that here, there are phonomancers, touched by this sound magic, to make the influence explicit.

Phonogram's other obsession - very much in evidence in the collection of short stories in its second offering ‘The Singles Club’ (see what they did there?) - is identity, and the ways in which music allows us to belong, to rebel or to reinvent ourselves. It’s a whistle stop tour through one random indie night during which a host of phonomancers swirl past each other, each living out their own personal dramas. The interesting thing about it is the extent to which this is ‘inside out’ writing. In every single scene we’re allotted a protagonist  guide who invites us inside their head (and in one rather splendid case tells us to get the hell out again). There’s nowhere for them (or us) to hide from the insecurities, the jealousy or the spite that abound in every human heart and yet there’s something undeniably attractive about it all. We’re invited into the conversation and inevitably we wind up colluding with it.

It’s a dichotomy expressed perfectly in the recurrent character of Emily, a phonomancer of considerably greater power than David, who glides through the pages like some pierced medusa. You know you shouldn’t look but you do anyway. She’s undeniably a bitch, but she’s clever and insightful and just, well, *cool* as well. And as readers we’re granted a strange intimacy; the chance to see the old self she has abandoned to reinvent herself through sheer force of will.

For those interested in that sort of thing, it’s also worth noting that it all looks pretty damn sexy too. Where ‘Rue Britannia’ is noirey and printed entirely in black and white, ‘The Singles Club’ embraces a new palate; reds and oranges for that point in the evening when the air itself seems to sweat; moody blues and greys for more contemplative moments.  Jamie McKelvie draws human faces with a great deal of attention and even love, but the background detail is pared right down - it’s the *characters* that matter here. And the look of it isn’t the only additional dimension breathing life into Phonogram; there’s a sort of silent soundtrack that accompanies each scene, and for music lovers it offers dual opportunities for geeking out. (Kieron Gillen really knows his stuff and there are extensive notes on the music behind it all at the end of each book).

Perhaps the heart of it is that Phonogram celebrates the sheer, breathless, hedonistic, nihilistic thrill of sex and music and youth; of dark corners and wild parties and the exhilaration of existing in a perpetual state of not giving a fuck. It makes for a strangely unsettling read, but also an appropriately spell-binding one.

Because if magic exists anywhere, this is where it would be...

This week Kate is experiencing her annual bout of spring restlessness.

Five By Five - Comics, week 2: All Star Superman

Oh Superman, Superman. With your chiseled jaw and your lovely manners, you’re just the kind of superhero any girl could take home to meet her parents. Whilst Batman might come across as sullen and a little bit emo (what’s with all the black?) and Spider-Man tends to leave those sticky patches all over the place (highly undesirable when meeting the potential in-laws) Superman could be trusted to sip his cup of tea, and say all the right things about being a good person and choosing the righteous path and always remembering to floss.

The thing is though, as a hundred bitter single guys will tell you, that just isn’t always enough to get a girl’s pulse racing. And to be honest, Superman has always struck me as just a little bit, well, dull... So when faced with the Man of Steel himself on the cover of All Star Superman, cape flowing, hands beatifically raised, there may possibly have been some eye-rolling and pre-judging going on. Hard as it may be to believe it’s possible that I even approached the text with something less than true literary impartiality.

So this is where I tell you that the All Star version of Superman blew all my preconceptions away right? That this version of the character left me quivering with scholarly excitement and barely suppressed lust. Well, not quite. Superman here *is* distinctive (particularly in his Clark Kent incarnation) but essentially he wouldn’t be Superman without that aura of incorruptible goodness and perfection. It makes him iconic of course; an archetype of chivalry and moral courage. But it also makes him only slightly less bland than a sandwich made with one of those blasphemous plastic squares of cheese.

The point is that, as with swallows, one flying guy in a cape does not an amazing graphic novel make. And that’s OK. Because one flying guy in a cape plus a bunch of other interesting, well realised characters, deftly handled plotlines, and recurrent thematic ideas? Now you’ve got a summer.

Let’s assume for a moment that as a reader of this blog, you’re pretty likely to have come across Superman in one form or another; comics, eighties movies, life-size cardboard cut-out that you stole from the foyer of your local cinema growing up, whatever works for you. All Star Superman takes all of that accumulated baggage and turns it into lore, so that rather than a jumble of admittedly interesting but rather abstract ideas, what we get is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I won’t give away the hook that drives the story forward, but the premise allows for myriad explorations of mortality and what it means to be human, as well as what it means to be a super hero.

Superman himself of course has always struggled under the weight of dual identities, and there’s a stroke of genius in the artwork and the writing here. I’ve always found the ‘Clark is Superman, just with glasses and a suit’ school of thought a little less than satisfying, but in All Star Superman the two men *move* differently. Clark is a pot-bellied, head-bowed cerebral type; too busy thinking about his next story to exert much control over his hulking farm boy’s body. Whereas Superman is straight and tall and rigid (ahem), a Kryptonian arrow pointing the way to justice and betterment and all of that other good stuff. It’s effective and it has the odd side effect of placing doubt in the reader’s mind as well. There’s an early scene where Superman tries to convince Lois that he and Clark are one and the same. And even though I *know* he’s telling the truth, I sort of understand her skepticism. Is Clark truly a part of Superman or just a disguise he wears?

Lois, by the way, is gorgeously drawn and splendidly fiery throughout, though it would have been nice to see her with a bit more to do than just hanging around like some kind of sexy occasional table. To be fair, there is a gleeful episode where Lois’s Superwoman gets to wear the outfit and try out some saving of humanity for herself and her lack of hesitation when faced with the chance to live in Superman’s world for a while is telling. (We’ll gloss over the fact that even as a superheroine she still ends up as a bit of a damsel in distress). This trying on of Superman’s role is a recurring theme throughout, with both Jimmy Olsen and Lex Luthor also metaphorically donning that lycra and giving superpowers of their own a go at various points.

This question of what it means to live in a world where super-powers exist seems to be pretty central to the story in general and it’s not Superman who struggles with it, but the characters around him. Jimmy, a pair of wonderfully disdainful Kryptonian time travellers, Zibarro (more on him later), but none more so than Lex Luthor. I’ve never come across a Lex with more fully realized motivations than the one here; utterly unable as he is to reconcile himself to being ‘just’ an ordinary human in a universe where Superman is constantly buzzing around like a red and blue bee, stinging away at Lex’s own need to be brilliant and special. There’s almost a sibling-like relationship between the two of them as Lex rails against an older ‘brother’ the world will always prefer and Superman, ever patient, continues to try to re-direct Luthor’s energies. Lex’s focus is a world without Superman, and yet he positions Superman at the very centre of his own personal world.

Lex’s bigger problem though, is the story’s other over-arching message. ‘Superman’ is more than just the cells and the outfit that make up Kal-El. ‘Superman’ is an image of selflessness and idealism; an idea; a theory. And just as it’s impossible to destroy an idea once it’s free in the world, it’s equally impossible to destroy Superman. On a literal level, this manifests as a bunch of other red and blue clad heroes that haunt the pages throughout All Star Superman. Not only Lois as Superwoman, but future incarnations of Superman himself, as well as flawed doubles like the heartbreaking Zibarro, alone in his sentience on a planet of lesser beings (spot the unspoken metaphor…).

And maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to get on board with Superman as a character. I’ve been going about it in the wrong way, because fundamentally he’s more than that. All Star Superman makes this transience explicit. It isn’t Superman’s own story, it’s the story of humanity pursuing the ideals he embodies: goodness, self-sacrifice and, OK, who doesn’t like a chiseled jaw?

This week Kate Townshend is hoping you’ll join her in ignoring the temporal lapse between this and the last Five by Five column. It’s one of those timey, wimey, wibbly wobbly things.

Five By Five - Comics, week 1: Y: The Last Man (lucky so and so)

In an effort to stem the tide of my loquacity, (a Herculean task, as evidenced by my over-use of brackets) for the forseeable future my columns are going to narrow in focus a little. For the next five weeks, that focus will be on comics, a different one each time around, in an effort to expand my graphic novel horizons. If you’re expecting a traditional review then I would direct you to The Watcher or any of Proud Lion’s other fine review features, as this is likely to be more of a meandering - post-modern series of musings in the manner of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or y’know, that drunk guy you met on the train once.

Luckily Proud Lion’s proprietor Mr Fardon himself knows me well, so I sit clutching a comic (or graphic novel to give it its grown up moniker) that could have been made for me in my eager, hot little hands. Let’s face it, even the title has me quivering with anticipation: ‘The Last Man’. Is this some kind of feminist revenge fantasy?* Or a comment on the increasing infantilisation of the male gender as society plays out its own Peter Pan complex? Well no, but it’s just as exciting in its way. A plague of unspecified origin has wiped out every male sperm, foetus and fully grown mammal on the planet, leaving only protagonist Yorrick and his training-resistant helper monkey Ampersand untouched. The blurb on the back refers to this cataclysm as ‘gendercide’ and within the first few pages Yorrick’s sixty plus, ass-kicking, Congress-person mother is talking about being spanked. I’m already hooked.

Now just to get this out of the way, I realise there may be a (hopefully small) contingent of male readers out there who have only just flicked back to reading these words after a dreamy hour or two of staring into the middle distance and imagining life as the only man left on the planet. It may be all bikini clad lovelies, feasting like a king and endless blow jobs in your head, but Yorrick’s predicament is no mere male fantasy. And his position as lone male survivor makes him both different, and thus a threatening outsider, and valuable, and thus a potential commodity. One of his first experiences in this brave new world, sees him outed as male by a supermodel and almost sold to a brothel. The plague that kills of the men renders Yorrick a woman of sorts, and turns the world’s female population into men, all of a sudden struggling to grasp the vast powerhouse that swings open to them.

It’s a fascinating idea. I consider myself to be a feminist (raving only by request or on special occasions) yet if there was a major disaster it would be male voices I would look to for reassurance and guidance gliding out of the TV and radio, a kind of paternal authority that the modern world hasn’t managed to shrug off. Even in Western countries men outnumber women to a significant extent in positions of power across the board, from business to academia, from politics to religion. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when all the men suddenly up and die, it is the Secretary of Agriculture, a reluctant ‘farm girl’ as she describes herself, who suddenly becomes the President of the United States, dealing with squabbling political factions, religious extremists and a panicking populace into the bargain.

And this, of course, is another reason why anyone hoping for some kind of lone male utopia in Y: The Last Man will be disappointed. The women that remain are real and complex, with their own conflicting agendas. There are some of them who would like Yorrick to get busy spreading his seed around as much as possible, but there are plenty more who would just as soon kill him on sight, or study him in a lab, or put him to work in a freak show. Yorrick himself equally resists stereotyping, since far from playing the field, he spends the largest part of the story seeking out some sort of lovey-dovey, hearts and flowers reunion with his long-term girlfriend Beth. The characters throughout the story are eclectic from the singled minded Agent 355, to Israeli soldier Alter, to Yorrick’s own sister, Neo-Amazonian Hero.

The flip side of all of this though, is that the writer of Y: The Last Man could perhaps be accused of copping out of exploring what a world ruled by women would really be like, or at the very least they take the easy option out of it. In the story, the world ruled by women is... pretty much the same as the world ruled by men. And for the most part the characters portrayed as most sympathetic are those who seek to keep it that way. Yorrick is first in, lecturing his mother and her political colleagues when someone suggests throwing out the old constitution in favour of ‘Something new’. Now worthy a document as the constitution may be, I’d have liked to have seen more of the women deciding for themselves what sort of society to re-build, but maybe that’s just because I’m a crazy feminist. And crazy feminists don’t fair too well in this story. The only women really embracing the new world order are the misandrist Daughters of the Amazon, a collection of damaged and abused individuals for the most part, who turn away from their mistreatment by men and who believe that the plague is Mother Earth’s own purification ritual, cleansing herself of the male disease. They’re a problematic, if rather compelling group, not least because they very definitely do want to create a new kind of society, but one in which hatred of male-ness is central.

Despite this, it’s worth pointing out that Last Man would pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours. It’s a fascinating, thought-provoking read and the characterisation is largely spot on. And against my better judgement, I think Yorrick’s Mum might be one of my new heroines...

*Note: The majority of feminists do not really fantasise about the death of all men. Some of us even quite like them…

Kate Townshend is back, and better than ever!