This would probably work better on my comics blog, but I haven’t updated that in about 6 months and no one read it anyway, so I’m posting it here.
I love the writing of Warren Ellis. He writes like a slightly more deranged Hunter Thompson, but Ellis’s work is fiction, for the most part. And he writes comic books. Lately he has branched out into journalism and straight prose fiction, but he largely does comics. His newest venture is Black Summer. I’m really quite interested to see how this comic goes over.
I’m not very fond of the art in Black Summer. There is something about the line quality that I don’t like, a little too slick with a lot of line work. But I know that is just a taste thing. I tend to prefer the simplicity of someone like Tim Sale or the manic sketchiness of John Romita Jr. or the heavy line work of Jhonen Vazquez. Again, this is completely a taste thing, and did not really effect what I thought of the book. The important thing in this is the story, and that’s the part I think will have some interesting impact over the course of the print run.
Ellis is writing his own take on the Superhero genre. It looks to be that he’s doing something very similar to what Alan Moore did back in the 80’s with Watchmen, setting up an anti-hero and letting the reader make their own moral judgements. But the tremendous difference is that Ellis is quite explicitly using real world material as a springboard into his story.
In Black Summer 0 what appears to be the main character assassinates the president, vice president, and a number of presidential advisors in order to force America to be a democracy again. I think this is, perhaps, something that a large number of Americans could get behind, barring the killing of a number of people, of course. I think that Americans would like to be able to say that we really are a nation governed by its people. I know I would. I hate the fact that I have to feel ashamed of my country whenever I leave it. Or whenever we show up in the news doing something draconian, which is far too often. I wish we could have fair elections, that are above reproach, but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon. So, in that respect I think most people will get something useful out of a comic that, in no uncertain terms, points to the flaws in our current system that we have nearly all been able to see, but have been unable to discuss.
The truly interesting fact is that Ellis is British. His nationality is something that may well come into play in relation to a topic of this nature. Just where is he going with this story. At the outset, he is declaring the U.S. as the greatest bastion of freedom in the world, but one that has lost its way. Will that attitude persist? or will the criminality of our leadership just be a symptom of our own degraded nature. Do we have villains in office because they lied and cheated their way to the top, or because we really want a villain running the world? I am looking forward to the answer that a foreigner will give. I think that we are too close to our current problems to see them without distorted eyes. I think someone marginally outside of our culture may have a better perspective on just what is happening in our country. And I think that someone like Ellis is in a position to tell us what we can do to fix it.
Of course, any predictions about what would happen if we were suddenly forced to be democratic are kind of moot. After all, this is a work of fiction. By a foreigner. And it’s a comic book, and no one ever takes those seriously, anyway. At least, not until they have been made into a blockbuster movie. I don’t see a movie in Black Summer’s future. At least not for a decade or more has passed. It took at least that long for V for Vendetta to see a worthwhile shot at film. If only we had been told that our government should be afraid of us seven years ago, maybe we wouldn’t be in a position for yet another foreigner to be lecturing us on the cost and importance of ruling ourselves. But wait, we were, but comics are for kids and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I encourage you to go out, find a comic shop and get a hold of Black Summer. Number 0 is just a buck, and you can barely get a pint of gas for that these days.
Tune in tomorrow when I attack the church and a couple other things that you hold dear, just for completeness sake.
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