Sunday, 12 June 2011

This Week's Comics

Well, I didn't manage to make it into a regular feature, but I don't think I wanted to anyway. This is actually last week's comic, but I only picked it up on Thursday with this weeks comics.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1


Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' series of interlocking crime stories is one of my favourite comics currently being published as a serialised narrative. In practically every interview with him that I've read Ed Brubaker appears to like to point out one of his favourite themes, the relationships between between parents and children, dysfunctional familes. In the afterword printed in the back of this issue he tells us that this particular story came to him following his own father's death. Appropriately enough perhaps, it's the death of the protagonist's father which prompts Riley Richards' return to the small town of his youth from the nameless noir city where all of Criminal's narratives take place.

Brubaker is self conscious enough about his favourite themes, and Criminal is equally self conscious in the way it situates itself within the crime genre, with the slightly too obvious title, the 'pulp fiction'-like covers of Sean Phillips, and the articles spotlighting particular works of crime and noir fiction which appear in the back of each issue. The title of this story is equally self conscious in it's allusion to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. It also alerts us to one the story's themes of nostalgia (which Brubaker also helpfully points out for us in his afterword).

What interests me most is the way in which Brubaker and Phillips chose to visually depict the nostalgia which afflicts Riley as he returns to the small town of his youth. Various flashbacks puncture the issue's story, drawn in a style which appears to be lifted from Archie comics. As capable an artist as Sean Phillips is, he doesn't quite manage to appropriate the wholesome aesthetic that even someone like myself who has never read an issue of Archie would associate with that line's comics. This isn't entirely inappropriate since the youthful events that Riley pines for are far from the innocent escapades found in Archie. And it underlines just how innocent was the teenage sex and drug taking that we see, effectively contrasted with the more sordid contemporary reality found in the city depicted on the first tier of page two.

It also gives a tactile quality to Riley's nostalgia. By giving the images of the past an aesthetic which is so distinct from the present it becomes a self conscious appropriation of that nostalgia, which is further ditanced for the audience on the very first panel of the story's first page with a caption which locates the story's present not in our present but in 1982. It's also interesting because it's a device Ed Brubaker has used before. Published by Vertigo between 2000 and 2001, Deadenders is an odd series whose various elements didn't quite gel, only lasting for 16 issues. Consequently the last 4 become rather rushed after the leisurely pace of the preceding issues in a rush to give the series' overarching story a reasonably fitting conclusion. Brubaker's stated aim for the series was to try and create a series which would work in a similar way to Jamie Hernandez's work where there might be several main characters, but the story could be free to drop in on and follow other characters within the same world. It followed the adventures of a group of mod bikers within a post apocalyptic future America, slowly revealing the reasons for the mysterious cataclysm which has afflicted their world.

The last issue, in which the cataclysm unravels and something like our reality is restored, makes similar use of Archies aesthetic as the realistic teenagers we've followed over the previous 15 issues are transfigured into new characters with a new contemporary past. This may be a little unclear as I don't currently have access to the comic in question since most of my comics are in storage and I can only go on memory. The final pages find one of the characters driving one night and discovering some record he only vaguely remembers along with a vinyl player (even in 2001, a vinyl record player was an object which explicitly referenced the past). As he plays one of the records something of the past is mysteriously evoked, a past which is both the narrative we've seen in the previous 15 issues and an unseen past of the newly created character. The past is figured as an untouchable, even unknowable absence, referenced only by cultural fragments such as a vinyl record.

Which of course, it always is. That's why nostalgia can be so painful. I've only read a portion of Ed Brubaker's comics, but what I have read seems to have an ambiguous relationship with the past. One of his earliest pieces, the short 'An Accidental Death' which was serialised in Dark Horse Presents features a character looking back on the tragic events which occurred in his childhood. It's clear that this tragic occurrence has in some way scarred his present day narrating self, and the telling of his story is in no way cathartic. In different ways, his earlier Vertigo comics, Prez: Smells Like Teen President and Scene of the Crime both demonstrate an ambiguous relationship with the cultural legacy of the 1960s.* The relationship between generations may be an acknowledged preferred theme, but the various stories which have so far been published under the Criminal banner seem to be more marked by the depiction of characters unwilling or unable to escape their differently troubled pasts. This might be nothing more than a noir staple, and to a degree that's exactly what it is, but another theme that comes through prominently in many of Ed Brubaker's interviews is a somewhat complicated relationship with his own past. As a teenager he was something of a thief and drug addict who narrowly escaped prison. It was this he says which straightened him out. It's clearly left it's mark on him.

I don't generally favour biographical readings. They can be briefly illuminating, but rarely get at what's so fascinating about a particular work. It does interest me that there is a recurrent pattern hear. Brubaker is also fully aware of how seductive nostalgia can be, and the appropriation of Archie's aesthetic seems bound up with this seduction. It makes the past both tactile and distant. In the final pages of Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1 Riley Richards falls asleep on the couch in his childhood home after reading a bunch of his old comics. His dream self floats through the idealised vision of his past, before he wakes to the realisation that the solution to his present day problems is to murder his wife. It might be a noir staple of the morally compromised protagonist wanting to kill the wife he no longer loves, and no doubt there will be complications in future issues. It's never that easy. We're being warned here.


*Interesting that these comics were published at the company built on the success of Alan Moore and which has published so many comics by Grant Morrison, both of whom have a much more celebratory view of the 60s and its cultural inheritance.

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