Lost Girls: Book One

from:  http://www.undressmerobot.com

Lost Girls labors under 15 years of anticipation, work, and the legendary cantankerous, brilliant reputation of its writer: Alan Moore. Moore’s artist (and now, wife) Melinda Gebbie is no stranger to dispute herself, having been confronted with burnings of her books and plenty of heated discussion. The combination of these two minds is enough to cause a buzz—notwithstanding that, when asked, Moore will classify this graphic novel as pornography without the benefit of quotation marks trapping the word or excuses and apologies. One might suppose that expectation alone would overshadow this release and that no matter how good or shocking or thought-provoking it turned out, the controversy would fizzle or the narrative would disappoint. Neither of these outcomes comes to fruition after reading Book One: “Older Children.”

Initially, I was going to take on reviewing all three books at the same time. After finishing Book One, I realized that this wouldn’t be possible. My two pages of notes on this first installment couldn’t be shoved into one terse statement. Also, the text raises so many questions and ripe situations for debate that it deserves more than just a surface treatment. There hasn’t been anything like this before in comics and so therefore I feel a bit as if each step I take crunches eggshells. That said, I’m not going to shy away from spoilers, so if you don’t want to know specific plot points, you need to stop reading this.

As simply put as possible, the story concerns three main characters that most people will recognize from their childhood: Dorothy Gale, Alice Fairchild, and Wendy Darling. These names are familiar from the stories read to children as The Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. All grown up now, each woman is a slave to her past, as they will come to find out. “Older Children” takes us through the process of these women encountering each other in the Hotel Himmelgarten, a Swiss hotel with unique white volumes in the place normally occupied by Bibles in guestrooms. With the backdrop of the hotel and the book in each room, the women begin an exploration that will inevitably draw in everyone around them and forever change their view of the world.

It is fitting that Moore has separated this epic into three books, and the three books into respective chapters. The rigid structure makes it easier to keep track of the action and it suits the story better, which is really more of a novel than a lot of the books on the bestseller lists. If you take a peek at the price for this lushly manufactured set, you may be a bit shocked. You’d be even more stunned searching for the individual books on any Internet auction site.

In Chapter 1 (“The Mirror”), we meet Lady Fairchild, an older woman with a penchant for erotica and mind-altering substances. She comes from a privileged family, and therefore can get away with being a bit batty; this makes her a perfect tour-guide for our introduction into the bizarre world of Lost Girls. (Lady Fairchild, better known as Alice, has much experience traversing unknown territory.) Rendered in soft lines and extremely realistic features, the readers only view Fairchild through her precious mirror for the first part of the story. Gebbie’s art immediately casts a spell, taking you out of the ordinary world. Each panel could be a painting, with the amount of detail and obvious love she has given them. If you’re looking for exaggerated and improbable comic babes, you won’t find them here. The mirror’s gilt frame serves as a border for the panels and exemplifies well the captive feelings Fairchild hides.

As soon as the first chapter opens, we see Fairchild masturbating with abandon and seemingly talking to the mirror while she pleasures herself. She seeks the mirror’s approval constantly, and when she encounters a fan of her fiction upon arriving at the Himmelgarten, she summarizes Plato in reply: “…the world beyond fiction’s mirror, that is the true world and we are but the faintest reflections grown pale beneath the glass.” This weighty statement, as we will later see, elucidates much about how her checkered childhood has affected her.

Chapter 2, “Silver Shoes,” introduces us to Miss Gale (or “Dottie,” until we find out exactly who she is). Once again, the art is totally striking and so different from anything comic readers are used to seeing. Miss Gale immediately starts her sexual adventures as well, meeting a dashing young man named Rolf Bauer who is at the Himmelgarten to “convalesce.” (Let me interject here that one of the many reasons I love Alan Moore is that he doesn’t shy away from so-called “50-cent” words in his comics.) She and Rolf copulate with abandon outside the hotel, and this first sex scene initiates us into the uninhibited way intercourse is dealt with in Lost Girls: there will be no demure cutting away from explicit panels.

In keeping with the theme of the fetish objects of the main characters, we see lots of shots of Dottie’s shoes: silver, striking, and a nod to her red slippers. Rolf likes them, too, a lot. “Like shoes, we try on our fantasies, yes?” he flirts coyly. Miss Gale reminds him that we also outgrow shoes or they become too “dull, familiar, and comfortable.” Dorothy’s over-the-top Southern accent is a little distracting at first, but it seems to be meant to demonstrate her free-spirited, All-American-girl personality.

We’re introduced to the final lady in Chapter 3, “Missing Shadows.” This portion starts with an outstanding page of the balcony, where we can see Lady Fairchild and Dorothy begin their friendship in a series of snaking word balloons that ultimately lead to the stodgy couple who has just occupied the room next to them. Mr. and Mrs. Potter (our Wendy Darling’s new surname) are a middle-aged pair who have become complacent and, of course, sexually unadventurous. This chapter also lets us into the pages of the White Book, the erotica in place of the Bible in their rooms. Gebbie’s mimic of English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley’s work is insanely stunning; in fact, all of the White Book is luxuriously illustrated in the styles of revered erotica, and all of the imitations are spot-on.

In one of the many clever visuals of this installment, the Potters engage in a bit of innuendo-soaked chit-chat while their shadows do all the things that they cannot allow themselves to do.

Chapters 4-6 see the women slowly drawing closer. In the case of Fairchild and Dottie…extremely close. They do not hesitate to get into each other’s knickers, and have no hang-ups or repression. The Potters spy the women in the hotel’s restaurant and their interest is piqued. Mrs. Potter, in particular, can’t seem to stop looking at them and thinking about them. In fact, she’s so intrigued that she’s caught spying on one of their sexual escapades. This incident begins the heart of the book: the three women exploring each other, their mental landscapes, experiences, and the roots of their libidos.

In the next few vignettes, we are treated to individual examinations of the women’s pasts with re-imaginings of our cherished childhood stories. “Re-imagining” is a pretty tame word to use in this context. Dorothy tells her tale first: As a young woman caught in a tornado, thinking that the end is near, she experiences her first orgasm by stimulating herself as the house spins. Gebbie renders Kansas in fittingly rich, sepia tones.

Wendy is goaded into revealing her story next, something that she has not told anyone but has been dying to let out. The art shows the familiar Darling family and Peter Pan in panels that almost look like stained glass. Up until Wendy’s story, nothing in the text had made me uncomfortable, and I was beginning to wonder what the ruckus was about. Instead of trying to describe Mrs. Potter’s experience, I’ll leave the interpretation up to the individual reader. I will say that I’m sure Moore and Gebbie weren’t surprised at the protest of Barrie’s estate.

Lady Fairchild’s memory is not a pleasant one, but it is rife with clever allusions to the Alice of lore. She is approached by Bunny, her father’s oldest friend, who plies her with wine that makes her body feel “too large or too small.” In the same mirror that she is so attached to, we see her molestation. It’s all very vague. Or, at least, it seems that way: the whole sequence is somehow less visceral than the other women’s experiences.

The last chapter in Book One, “Stravinsky,” gives us a bit of historical perspective as Lady Fairchild takes her fellow adventuresses and their men to the opera. In an excerpt from her diary, we see her exasperation with the men and the music enticing the women into a fondling session that no one seems to notice (which is really quite remarkable). Flowing writing and more alluring artwork make it an enjoyable topper. Book One ends on this note, and a promising beginning it is indeed.

Lost Girls: Book Two

from:  http://www.undressmerobot.com

When we last left our protagonists, they were getting to know each other more intimately in the dreamlike and reality-shrouded Hotel Himmelgarten. Lady Fairchild, Dorothy, and Mrs. Potter are united by shared experience: as their friendship unfolds, they tell each other stories of their unique and sometimes troubling sexual initiations. Each woman is drawn to the confessional triad for her own reasons, but it has begun to open up a world of exploration that none of them were prepared to undergo.

In the reading of Lost Girls, by the time you reach Book Two (“Neverlands”), the sex has become a bit commonplace. It is a stretch to find a page without some degree of nudity, love making, or at the very least, innuendo. All well and good, because the creators’ stated purpose was that they were attempting to raise the bar and approach pornography with more seriousness. Yes, it is smut, but it is “Edwardian smut,” as Neil Gaiman pointed out, and feels more academic. That aside, there is still so much sex in these pages that you honestly get tired of it.

Chapter 11 finds Wendy’s husband writing an uptight letter to his boss that is illustrated with contradictory scenes of life at the Himmelgarten. The White Book, one of the many plot devices employed by Moore, is getting a hold on even this prudish man. Both The White Book and the girl’s childhood stories provide anchors to keep this beast of a plotline shored. The readers will notice now that the second book is the height of the characters’ time spent at the hotel; the debauchery is at its height.

Meanwhile, Mr. Potter’s wife is having tea with Lady Fairchild—tea, of course, meaning light conversation and heavy petting. This chapter is set up as one long panel on the right, with Gebbie’s art mimic of Alfons Mucha and Moore’s verse mimic of Apollinaire, each relief representing one the Seven Deadly Sins. The panels on the left show us the actual dialogue/intercourse between the ladies. Moore’s writing finally starts to really shine on these verses, my favorite being the ditty on Sloth.

Chapter 13 is a smart little mirror of this one, but with the boys of the story. (I was beginning to wonder if they were going to get some action. Though Bauer has taken up with Dorothy I was kind of expecting this revelation.) Bauer and Potter have their own round of beverage and sex, the panel set-up being nearly the same as the chapter before. The long panel on the right, this time, is Gebbie’s deft interpretation of Egon Schiele and Moore’s witty version of Oscar Wilde. Back in bed that night, the adulterous Potters lie back to back, not touching.

Just a side note: I never thought reviewing a comic would require me to do so much research and I never thought erotica would make me feel amateurish. The only artists I could identify right off the bat were Beardsley and Wilde. I’m not sure what art was truly Gebbie’s and what was a riff on some reference that I didn’t catch. Different kind of insecurity this porn inspires, it seems.

In “The Straw Man,” the back story of the girls’ childhood begins again, with the long panels of Dorothy’s dusty Kansas past. The accent’s less annoying now, as readers have surely gotten used to it. After the tornado, Dorothy is cognizant of her sexuality and starts to seek out gratification in the world around her. The farm has, of course, farm boys. She tells the other women of her experience with the first (quite obviously a parallel to Oz’s Scarecrow): “He smelled blonde.”

Each of this series of the girls’ youth contains a full page panel showing the surreal nature of their stories; a blend of their fantasy and reality. In Dorothy’s, we see her clinging to a Scarecrow in heavy winds, her skirt blowing up fancifully while he hangs, limp. It’s a summation of how she describes the occurrence.

The girls move to the steam room, finding it more appropriate for discussion. Wendy is more forthcoming now, as she gives her chronicle, employing the now familiar and oppressively lovely tall panels. Though the art is nice, I’m finding Wendy’s past the least appealing, with the most content choices that I can’t quite understand. Here we meet the Lost Boys and Annabel (guess who). She’s the girl they first saw Peter with and she’s introduced as his sister. When she jealously flounces away, Wendy is told that she must replace Annabel in the game they were to play, where “she would be their mother, in a special kind of way.” You can surely tell what Moore’s leading to here. This chapter’s full panel shows Wendy being suckled by cubs with the Lost Boys’ faces. She lies in the grass as they cling all over her; mother cub in the den.

We descend back into the ovals of Alice’s mirror as the women take to the pool for the continuation of Lady Fairchild’s story. Fairchild relates that her earlier experience with her father’s friend left her distrustful of men, and attending a girl’s boarding school cemented her infatuation with the fairer sex. Like the flowers in Wonderland, the girls opened up a new world to her, including a teacher named Miss Regent. Unlike the molestation of her other story, when she is finally approached by this red queen, it is entirely welcome. Again, the writing in this book was much more vivid to me than Book One: when Regent offers Alice a job as her assistant after kissing her, she promises that she will show the girl “kisses in comparison to which the kiss we’d just concluded was a slapped face.” Alice’s full panel shows her in the classic blue dress and apron, hands in her pockets, slightly detached from the exploding colors of her flowers wrapping around the page.

In Chapter 17, Alice takes the girls on a picnic a few days later to continue her story. On the car ride there, Alice narrates more. Miss Regent has married and is now Mrs. Redman, leading a Bacchanalian lifestyle under her husband’s nose. Alice tells of mad tea parties and all manner of draped girls, culminating in a slightly disturbing full panel of the Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, and friends…with breasts.

It’s Dorothy’s turn again, as Wendy reminds us, showing at the same time that she’s fully lost any inhibitions about the psychological journey that the women are taking together. She reminisces as they board a train to take them to an island for a picnic. Dorothy’s second sexual conquest is a sketch of the Cowardly Lion, here a rough-talking farm boy, stout and loud. When she calls his bluff and approaches him, he practically turns into a scared kitten, unsure of himself and surprised by her forwardness. There’s another full panel, Dorothy copulating with a half-human/half-lion. She says she made him brave, but it just wasn’t enough for her. There was something missing from her sexual education.

Wendy’s next. She tells of her and Peter alone, letting themselves go in “Peter Breaks Through.” Their intimate time is interrupted by a man Peter calls Huxley; a man with a hooked finger. This version of Captain Hook is a lecherous pedophile, spying on the young couple in the foliage. This full panel features a distressed Wendy, watching as Peter and Hook “duel” for her affections.

The last chapter of Book Two is the zenith of all of their time together: a long afternoon, relayed by Lady Fairchild’s journal, of making up stories and smoking opium, slowly sliding into a fantasy of their own creation. Their unreality is juxtaposed with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, further driving home the point that they are existing apart from the visible world. Yet, parallels still run between the orgy Fairchild writes about and the words which wind their way into the political event.

Thus Book Two ends, with the blood of the Archduke and a quiet trip back to the boat for the girls. Fairchild feels as if “a season turned”, and the whole tone of the novel switches, which seems to foretell a much darker conclusion.

Lost Girls: Book Three

from:  http://www.undressmerobot.com

I entered Book Three with consternation; I’ve been conflicted about finishing Lost Girls for some time now. It’s not that I haven’t liked the art or the writing, but that even after two full books (clocking in at 112 pages each) I still wasn’t emotionally attached or involved with any of the characters. This is generally what keeps me around with any other work. I was also feeling desensitized to the sexual theme of the book, being that it’s so saturated with everything conceivable.

It’s just so fleshy. In a graphic novel that addresses not just sex, but complex issues like war, imagination, and censorship, there seems to be very little room for sentiment. The three women who should have been complicated and relatable had become, in my mind, simply vessels for Alan Moore’s pro-pornography argument. Although I don’t disagree with his points, the execution still leaves me feeling inconsistent after following him all the way through to the finish. In all honesty, I’m not sure I would have read all of this without having committed to reviewing the book.

The third installment (“The Great and Terrible”) is spent tying together, thankfully, the many loose ends that were bothering me. The conclusions of the girls’ childhood stories explain their confused adult lives and the deep-seated repressions that gave them the bond they share at the Hotel Himmelgarten. As each woman finishes her story, she begins to show a little more personality. Especially with Wendy, once you know the full extent of their accounts, they become less remote and more sympathetic. The ends of their tales are unflinchingly sad; they refuse to look away from the ugliness, yet don’t apologize for it. The women simply deal with what hurt them, realizing together that it has made them stronger.

The history of the hotel is elucidated in this installment, as well. Monsieur Rougeur’s back-story illustrates how the place became a temporary autonomous zone for debauchery. This final book is one of justification and consequence; it’s the dream colliding rudely with reality.

“Everyone’s leavin’ the hotel,” Dorothy tells us in her somewhat grating exaggeration of an accent. Book Two left us with the assassination of the Archduke, the event that is considered to be the start of World War I, and it has already begun to have an effect on the sheltered little world they have created. Everything begins to crumble, as Wendy’s husband is sent back to work and Rolf goes off to his regiment. Monsieur Rougeur, the proprietor of the establishment, informs the ladies the any sexually inhibited staff and guests have vacated. Guess what? Orgy! Rougeur reads the two dirtiest stories from his White Book before he confesses his sins to the three protagonists, under extreme duress.

It’s here that Rougeur becomes Moore’s proxy, proclaiming that his lurid tales of incestuous families are acceptable because the characters within them are fictional, and therefore ageless and innocent of crime. “Fiction and fact,” Rougeur stresses, “only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.” (As a side note, this section becomes something of a postmodern wink-wink, as Rougeur tells us that the characters in the White Book are blameless, but he is real and thus quite guilty of lechery.)

This is an integral part of Moore’s smut thesis: pornography is necessary to release the darker sexual thoughts of humans so they do not run rampant in the real world. In an interview with the AV Club, Moore takes this thought further, mentioning that the occurrence of sex crimes in Holland, Denmark, and Spain (where porn proliferates freely) is nowhere near that of Britain and America. He points out that “…pornography might be providing an essential pressure valve in those countries, which we do not have access to here.” Yes, all well and good, but not every pornographer has the high literary standards of Moore and Gebbie, much less the commitment. Lost Girls raises the bar, but it’s not going to get rid of the porn that we currently have, which most times does more damage than good.

The sexual atmosphere in the whole of the book is one of free expression and understanding; the pornography outside of this carefully crafted world is often the reason that people get the wrong idea about what their partner might want. It’s a noble idea to take pornography back to its literary tradition, but it won’t go much further than within these expensive pages. The book itself is a fetish object, pricey and handsome. The normal consumers of porn aren’t going to be reading this or thinking about its implications. I can’t imagine that anyone picking up this book didn’t know exactly what he or she was getting, especially with its mythical history in the comic book industry. This is what’s commonly known as “preaching to the choir.”

As the women prepare to leave the hotel and take their new knowledge back to husbands and lovers, the talk turns to the conflict. After a brief conversation about whether or not war destroys imagination, we segue to the invasion of the Himmelgarten by German soldiers. The final dialogue in Lost Girls is entirely in German, which is kind of like a slap in the face after getting all the way there. Without giving much away, the castle in the sky the women created cannot survive without them. Even after translating the dialogue and reading it over, the climax is…well…limp. Vaginal imagery in the last few panels is no surprise, and the sudden intrusion of the war on the women’s newfound freedom doesn’t really add up. Really, I’m not reluctant to say I don’t quite get inferred meaning here, or exactly what I was supposed to take away from this final tableau. I could draw parallels all day (Alice’s talk of war not having the ability to destroy beauty; beauty in the gore of battle) but none of it is quite satisfying enough for the investment it took.

I appreciate the new things I learned by reading Lost Girls, such as the artists I hadn’t known (what a gift Egon Schiele is, and Gebbie’s mimic has a splendor all its own), but ultimately, it was really hard for me to finish the saga. I simply didn’t want to read on. I had quickly gotten the gist, and there were no attachments to keep me tethered. I have a feeling that the creators were expecting this kind of reaction, and that they don’t feel slighted or misunderstood. It’s a successful effort, they accomplished what they set out to do, and at the end of the day the book is obviously theirs and extremely personal. The readers feel a little left out, that’s all. I don’t feel closeness with the triad of women, but I’m quite sure Moore and Gebbie do. I never knew Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy outside of their carnal escapades, and that made them less genuine for me.

Regardless of its shortcomings, Lost Girls is hardly a failure. It was interesting to learn in my research that most of the book had been drawn before it was scripted, and looking back on the panels, I can see how the art guided the innuendo. This wouldn’t have been possible without both participants being on exactly the same wavelength, and the stamp of a mind-meld is all over this work. Gebbie acquits herself nicely in every area, but particularly shines in her full-page renderings of formative moments in the women’s journeys. There was never a time in the massive text that I thought the artwork slipped. When you think about it, that’s a hell of an achievement. Both Moore and Gebbie are powerhouses, but the problem may be that I felt as if I’d intruded upon a private conversation of theirs.

110 PER¢

from:  http://www.undressmerobot.com/

Before we begin any discussion of Tony Consiglio’s 110 PER¢, I want to provide you, dear reader, with full disclosure. I wanted to review this comic because it’s about older women obsessed with 110 PER¢, a boy band. Similarly, in my early twenties, I had a startling and freakish passion for *N’Sync. Knowing I’d be attaching my own experience to whatever commentary Consiglio had to offer, I went in with prejudice. Turns out, we came to about the same conclusions.

People will attach to just about anything to distract themselves from the harsh reality we live in. (Comic books, anyone?) When I loved the boys of *N’Sync, I was going through an identity crisis and dealing with the deaths of two close family members. Consiglio’s characters, Sasha, Gertrude, and Cathy, have similar holes in their lives that they are trying to fill with shiny, perfect worlds. We’re introduced to them one-by-one and their situations are obvious from the offset.

Sasha and her husband do not have the perfect relationship and at the beginning, he’s practically emotionally abusive. Cathy is a lonely and obese single woman, getting older every day, stuck in an office job where she doesn’t have any friends. Gertrude (“Gerty,” to her friends) has a loving family but she just can’t seem to keep her attention focused on them. All three women, members of the MOFO 110 PER¢ club (Mature Older Fans of 110 PER¢), find relief for their problems in fixating on their favorite band. The impetus for the comic was a meeting much like this one for fans of the Backstreet Boys. A woman Consiglio worked with was a member, so out of curiosity he accompanied her to the gathering. He was stunned, scared, and inspired, and here we have the result.

Consiglio renders the story with realistic dialogue and characters that you could find on a city bus or in your cubicle. He accomplishes this in many ways: breaking the “fourth wall,” vivid expressions, louder-than-words action, etc. He illustrates the panic of obsession by turning panels sideways or employing panels within panels so you can feel the hyper-emotive states. Even the lettering (an uncomfortable OH, palpable anger in buzzing lines, somehow not cliché) contributes to the depth of each person, down to minor characters. Clever bits of visual clues are all over this graphic novel. It’s not so aware of itself as to be pretentious, just madly charming. Consiglio has stated that he didn’t want to “over-render” his creations and that he wanted them to be “bare minimum.” I think what he considers to be bare minimum is a whole lot more than a lot of indie comic artists. His cartoony style complements the story in a whole new way, and the quirks he can achieve make his world unique. It’s visually interesting without wandering into cheeseball, telling what is, at heart, a very adult story.

My favorite of these tactics is the douchebag in Cathy’s office who gives her a double thumbs-up and a “You rock!” after conning her into making him a birthday cake. It’s a perfect illustration of a shallow, backhanded jerk—with just a gesture and two words. The entire book is peppered with these moments. Cathy’s alienation at the office is shown without words when Consiglio actually draws her as an extraterrestrial.

As the story progress toward the release of 110 PER¢’s new album and the inevitable big concert, so do the women’s personal journeys. I won’t give much away; it’s definitely better to go into this not knowing what to expect. This is a tale where the people change, for better or worse, and they’re the makers of their own fates. The three main characters have very distinct personalities, levels of obsession, and outcomes. Consiglio manages to craft a story that is serious, hilarious, and even disgusting at times. It goes by like a bike ride and is totally self contained.

At the beginning of this review, I said that Consiglio and I came to basically the same conclusion about obsession. I’m not totally sure he’d agree with me, but either way, the thing that I took away from the book was the relation between fixation and loneliness. It’s not a crime to have an escape from reality (it’s sometimes necessary, in fact) but if you allow yourself to be consumed, you miss the world around you. You can acknowledge it and move on, or you can be trapped in trying to catch the proverbial brass ring. The thing about that: even if you get the ring, it’s probably tarnished.

Consiglio says his next project is “a story about a man searching for his son. It involves pharmaceutical espionage and the cure for ‘The Herpes.’ It’s called Titanius.” I’m not sure if he’s shitting me or not, but if he’s for real, I’ll pre-order now.

DMZ: On the Ground

from: http://www.undressmerobot.com

After my review of Testament, I got an e-mail from Liam Sharp graciously thanking me. I knew DMZ was up next on my list and I’d already read the first two issues and instantly loved it, so I expressed my concern that I was about to become “Vertigo Grrl.” “Nothing wrong with being a Vertigo grrl!” he replied. I almost wished I didn’t like DMZ, so that I wouldn’t be pigeonholed as approving whatever the DC subsidiary did.

Unfortunately, it’s great. I take that back. Fortunately, it’s great. Vertigo is undergoing a renaissance, slowly but surely, and the books they’re producing are proof. You need only read the synopses of their recent work to see the direction of the imprint: Less ethereal and gothy, more gritty, contemporary, and madly interesting. If I’m “Vertigo Grrl,” I accept the title proudly and I’m sure the costume is super hot.

Apocalyptic images used to be classified as just sci-fi or far off scenarios, but now the buzzword seems to be “near-future.” The word “dystopian” is used with abandon. What with the world blowing-up and more division than accord, it’s scary times we live in. Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s first trade paperback of DMZ (Issues 1-5) proposes that these times could indeed get worse. Things are happening in world politics faster than we can process them. War is everywhere but our doorsteps. What if we heard it knock?

“Every day is 9-11″ declares graffiti in the lobby where intern Matty Roth waits for an assignment. In plenty of other countries, every day is like 9-11 and has been for as long as they can remember. It doesn’t hit home in America because there isn’t a context for it. In Matty’s world, America has become a country torn by civil war. The Free States, essentially a citizen militia, have taken the territory from Jersey onto the west. This was facilitated by the fact that the American military forces are concentrated on wars around the world. The United States government as we know it only operates in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island. Smack between these warring factions is the former Manhattan Island, a demilitarized zone (a-ha! DMZ!) that not much is known about. Liberty News, the government mouthpiece, feeds their citizens misinformation contending that radicals and dangerous insurgents populate the place.

Matty, the fresh-faced intern, finds himself in a helicopter on assignment and heading to the DMZ. We follow him through the destruction of his team (who graciously leave him behind after being shot down) and see the DMZ through his eyes and his lens. As the first issue ends, he has become an embedded journalist against his will.

The first five issues give us the set-up, but not the meat. (I admit, I cheated; I got the next volume before finishing this review because I wanted more information.) Most of the exposition is introduction of the main characters and teasers to where the story might lead. The trade released on June 7th, 2006, makes you feel unfulfilled but it’s not an uncomfortable place to be. Call it delayed gratification.

These beginning issues are fairly objective; I get the impression that this is because Matty doesn’t know much yet. He can’t really have an opinion because he’s cataloging events and the incidents he’s trying to process are taxing. Impatient readers may be frustrated with the mystery surrounding the back-story, but I think that is simply another sign of the death of the American attention span. DMZ isn’t afraid to make you wait a bit, to let a story evolve.

Burchielli and Wood are sharing the art chores: Burchielli doing the bulk of the story and Wood handling the covers and the pages depicting television spots from Liberty News. Wood’s pages are of the now familiar graphic design style he’s known for and work very well to convey media manipulation a la Fox News. (Liberty’s slogan is “News for America. And Americans!”)

Burchielli, an Italian illustrator, is fairly new to stateside work with the big guns. His take on a gutted-out New York benefits from his meticulous detail—the graffiti, the garbage, the bombed buildings, even the incidental crowd characters are attention-grabbing. Though the panels are fairly straightforward and box in the action, they are packed with stuff to look at. Colorist Jeremy Cox flood Burchielli’s drawings with the same tones you may remember from footage of bomb-ridden cities in Iraq. Muted, beige, washed out: Manhattan is a ghost town where the living still drag color around. It’s a bit Carpenter and a bit wild west. The art gives you no reason to doubt the reality of the dire state of affairs; it only makes it more authentic.

The first trade paperback of DMZ leaves the reader unsatisfied, but not in a dreadful way. It’s the unsatisfied feeling of going back for seconds during a tasty dinner and finding no more food. Luckily, someone’s put some away in the refrigerator for you to take home. As I mentioned before, I read the newest issues. I assure you, you’ll get a second helping of the same great stuff.

Testament: Akedah

from:  http://www.undressmerobot.com

If you have pets, you probably know about the chip that you can have implanted in their skin so that an electronic system can track them if they should get lost. Did that give you pause when you first heard about it? Did you think, even for a moment, that if they can do it to animals, they could do it to you? If so, Testament is a comic book you’ll dig.Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and writer in many different forms, teams with Liam Sharp on this ambitious new title from DC/Vertigo. The covers of early issues reveal a bit about Rushkoff: quotes of praise from Grant Morrison and Tim Leary, the fact that he is the winner of a Marshall McLuhan award (if these names are recognizable, you are suitably impressed). Liam Sharp is also a renaissance man with a publishing company, an imposing comic related resume, and a band. Name something creative, he’s probably done it. Kudos to whomever at Vertigo had the idea to pair these two.

Testament doesn’t have a straightforward plot; there are a whole lot of things going on and that complexity increases with every issue. At the offset, we meet Jake Stern, a college kid with connected parents, who doesn’t have a chip implanted in his arm at the beginning of the story, even though the government is now requiring everyone to be tagged. This is because he was born in France (a country that doesn’t require the chip at birth) and not because his father is the creator of said machinery (even though he is). In the near future, where the action begins in Testament, all children born in the States are automatically implanted with an RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification. It seems that Jake has fallen in with a revolutionary crowd about the same time that Alan, his father, is told that he must put a chip in his son. These little buggers are tricky—although Alan thought he was creating them for tracking only, there is the possibility that something more nefarious is going on. Jake and his friends already suspect this and more, being enlightened cyber-bohemians.

Oh, yes, and then there’s Abraham of Ur.

Abraham, like Alan, has been asked to fulfill a duty by possibly harming his son. A powerful deity asks Abraham to sacrifice his boy, his most beloved son, Isaac. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Surely you have, in some form…it’s straight from the Bible.

Testament isn’t a comic book, it’s a commitment. The first five issues, collected into a handy trade paperback released on July 26th, read more like a sequential art thesis statement than anything else. Rushkoff’s varying experience (cultural critic, author of books on cyber land, youth, and religion) combines to give fresh perspective on a timely issue: the world of the Bible is happening right now. The plot line of the book itself is juxtaposed with Bible stories (including characters with suspiciously familiar looking faces) to illuminate common archetypes and themes. It’s as if someone gave Joseph Campbell hash and dropped him off in the year 2010.

Don’t let the seemingly dense premise stop you from picking up this book—Sharp’s art ties together anything Rushkoff leaves hanging. The only real complaint I’ve heard about this book, from either friends or reviewers, is the one I just mentioned: “This is too academic.” Well, I think it’s high time for more of that in comic form. It’s time to evolve. You’re supposed to make connections yourself and Rushkoff trusts his readers to be intelligent enough to do so or go back and do their research. Trust in an audience is a thing mostly lost with writers these days, especially comic writers, and I appreciate the fact that someone isn’t assuming his readers are complete idiots. (Also, we’re in the modern world, if you don’t understand something…Wikipedia.) It’s best to read the first five issues at the same time; the more you read, the more you like. The book takes a little time to unfold for you and if you’re jumpy or impatient, just kick back and stick with it.

In fact, in Issue 1, Jake’s professor makes a statement that easily breaks down the point of the Bible/modern world mirror technique. Speaking of Freud, the professor says, “[His] work went well beyond the personality of the individual, to the totems and taboos we use to create a narrative through which we all, collectively, interpret the world around us.” Fittingly, Sharp has drawn the professor to resemble Rushkoff himself.

Rushkoff wisely knows what choir he’s preaching to, as witnessed in “On the Ledge,” a Vertigo feature at the end of Issue 1. He also explains quite clearly what he’s doing to accommodate readers who may be confused or find the narrative obtuse. There are some insider wink-winks, for the eagle-eyed, such as the panel with the RFID. (The government is keeping a close eye on Genesis P-orridge—who doesn’t seem to have a chip—and Morrison, G., Devlin, J., Sharp, L., and Grant, J.)

Sharp’s artwork is spot-on: the characters’ personalities are complimented by their appearances and they all look like real people you might actually run into around your city. Expressions are vivid and telling, as are the backgrounds and the lovely cross-hatching work (which could have very well turned out contrived). It looks like Rushkoff and Sharp are the perfect match for this particular project, something that Rushkoff speaks about in our exclusive interview.

There are the requisite hot comic girls, but they are portrayed in a way that is neither abrasive nor demeaning. Miriam and Dinah, the two girls closest to Jake, are both assertive and in control of their sexuality. The goddess Astarte, always portrayed topless, displays her sexual power in context without slipping into excess. Jamie Grant’s coloring brings the artwork to life even more.

My only beef is the covers. So far, they haven’t captured me and they don’t betray the rich content and artwork inside.

While I finish this review, the local Fox affiliate is reminding me that Israel and Lebanon are erupting. Testament reminds us that religion is not set in stone, but a tool we can use to decipher (or hack, if you’re more comfortable with that term) reality and identify archetypes to further elucidate our understanding of the world.

Douglas Rushkoff Interview

from:  http://www.undressmerobot.com/

Douglas Rushkoff, eclectic author of books on culture, youth, and religion, is now doing the writing duties on a Vertigo graphic novel, Testament. The comic relates events in a near-future society to stories from the Bible, demonstrating archetypes that reoccur in history since recorded time. With the help of Liam Sharp’s intense and memorable artwork, Rushkoff has injected interesting parallels and new ideas to explore into the sequential art world. He was gracious enough to grant Undress Me Robot an exclusive interview, answering some questions I had after reading Issues 1-5 of Testament. The on-going series is now available in its first collected version.

How far ahead do you have the storyline planned? It seems like it could be quite an epic.

That’s because it’s based on one of the most epic stories one can tell. I mean, how many are there? The Mahabharata? The Iliad? I mean, we can call Tolkien epic, but he wrote it over the course of decades – not centuries.

But the beauty of using the Bible is that, however “epic” it gets, it always stays on the level of real people. It’s really the story of humanity’s relationship with deity, told on the level of personal interactions. Even matters of state are told through the tales of competing brothers, star-crossed gay lovers, or guys who find out their wives are pagan sorceresses. The source material I’m working with scales better than anything I’ve ever read, working on both a human character level and a highly metaphorical level at the same time. It’s a great lesson for those of us who might otherwise get lost in the “meta” stories of our series. Keep to the people.

I’ve got the first four years of the story planned, but that only takes me through the first two books of the Bible. And even then, I’m barely skimming the surface. You have to remember, almost every sentence of the Bible can be pulled out and turned into a story richer than most of what passes for a 22-page comic book nowadays. For instance, in Exodus, God says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” What the heck does he mean? He’s saying that Pharaoh isn’t a good enough enemy for him, so he’s going to strengthen Pharaoh’s evil will – make a better adversary. And, at the same time, he’s taking Pharaoh’s free will away from him. Think of the story possibilities there… I know I’ll be using it.

Is Liam Sharp committed for however long the story continues? You play off of each other in an interesting way; what is your collaboration like?

Yeah – Liam says he was born to do this project, so my guess is he’s in it for life. When he got tapped for the project it all became kind of a fate thing, if you know what I mean. More than anything, Liam brings heart to this project. I do the plot, the intentions of the characters, the historicity and the allegory. Liam brings the personhood of both the characters and the gods.

He’s drawn a few of them way, way different than I imagined them. But that’s given me the opportunity to redesign the story arcs around who he came up with. Some of the characters are playing *different* Bible people than I had originally cast them for. But it turns out that it’s going to be much better – and more Biblically accurate – the way Liam has forced my hand.

What I’m saying is that by working from an emotional center, Liam has forced another kind of truth. And that truth has led me to do things that are actually more faithful to Bible. That’s how good the Bible is when you really click into its logic. Everything in there makes total sense, but you’ve got to approach it both intellectually and emotionally.

In going from novel and nonfiction form to sequential art, what have been the pitfalls and advantages?

Well, if I may be candid, the biggest disadvantage is financial. If you got a decent name and track record, book publishers will still throw a ton of cash at you upfront to write a book for them. I mean, nice money. Comics get you paid by the page. And doing just one of them won’t pay the rent. So you can’t just dig into one project and make that your life – which is the way I’m used to working.

But the advantages far outweigh that petty complaint. Sequential narrative lets you tell story from within and outside time, simultaneously. I’m amazed how few comics storytellers take advantage of the medium – but maybe that’s because they were never saddled by the extraordinarily linear limitations of regular book writing. Having spent ten or fifteen years writing text from left to write, I had accumulated a long list of narrative dynamics that I wanted to explore in a more dimensional medium. Just putting gods outside panels, for instance, is something I’d wanted to do since seeing the [Sergio] Aragones sketches in the margins of Mad. I kept asking myself why people hadn’t played with the convention before – created worlds around the very premise of sequential art.

The other difference between the literary world and the comics world is that the writers in comics aren’t assholes. Really – they’re just as smart, just as well read, and just as articulate as any of the New Yorker Magazine worshipped literary heroes on the “scene,” but they’re nice people. You tell them something you’re working on, and comics people voluntarily offer substantive suggestions for making it better. I mean, they share their actual ideas with you, for you to use. The people I had gotten used to in the book world simply nod and then steal the idea you’d asked for help on.

I think it’s because sequential art works more on an abundance model than a scarcity model. Everybody is happy on some level, so there’s a bounty of ideas. More ideas than any of us possibly has time to get on paper. So we all share with each other and – of course – end up with a much more fertile culture with yet more great stuff to share. It’s not a zero-sum game.

You seem to have a lot of trust in the readers’ intelligence. This is a rare thing in comics and very refreshing, but do you worry about being considered too academic?

No way. They say in the movies that you can never go wrong underestimating your audience’s intelligence. In comics, I think you can never go wrong overestimating your audience’s intelligence.

Sequential narrative is a cool medium, not a hot one. That means it’s participatory. Readers should be engaged, not immersed. They need to be comparing panels to one another, making sense out of sequence, finding patterns in the chaos.

Instead of fighting the alienating elements of comics, we need to be embracing them. Comics readers are both within the story and outside of the story watching the storytelling itself. That’s how this medium works. It’s why almost everyone who reads comics on some level knows they can write them. Why? Because they are already participating in the story making through their collaboration as interpreting readers.

That’s the only aspect that’s academic about it: me explaining how comics work as a medium. Hell, don’t trust me – read Scott McCLoud [author of Understanding Comics]. He’s totally right. It’s just that not enough of us are taking advantage of all that he told us about this medium.

So, no. I think readers appreciate a book that gives them more than just 22 pages of plot. Far too little happens in most comic books for the – what is it – $2.99 we charge for them.

I think we should pack these pamphlets with as much as they’ll hold. Give a straightforward experience for the kids who just want to flip through and find out who is screwing who or who got blown up and how – but then communicate on an entirely allegorical level, as well, for readers who want to experience the real possibilities for sequential narrative to wrestle with the themes of our age.

This graphic novel follows in the wake of Nothing Sacred, a book that caused you quite a bit of religious controversy. Out of the frying pan and into the fire?

Yeah, well, what I learned with Nothing Sacred was that the people who claim to be most interested in Torah or Bible are actually more interested in avoiding it. Nothing Sacred – a book that looks at the true core values of Judaism – was only controversial with the self-proclaimed protectors of the Jewish “race.” And they’re so committed to understanding the Bible in terms of race and nation state that they have lost all access to the stories and what they tell us about the illusion of race and the fiction of nation state! It’s all pretty sad and ironic.

But as I did the book tour for Nothing Sacred, I found very eager audiences everywhere I went that wasn’t a synagogue or church. People in bookstores were very ready to engage with these myths on a level much closer to the one in which they were intended. And that’s when I realized that a comic book might just give me both the ability to share these stories in the camouflage of a “non-serious” medium – and the storytelling tools I’d need to do it in a way faithful to the multi-dimensional tale I was telling.

Moreover, comics were a way to take the ideas and apply them to two storylines at once – the one that’s actually in the Bible, and the one we are living as a civilization, today.

It occurred to me that the comic is allowing you to tie together a lot of your previous media, youth, religion, and culture themes. Did it just happen like that or was it a conscious decision?

That’s just me. I mean, I’m one person so the things I’m concerned about tend to show up in everything I do. I’m talking to Vertigo about doing another book, though, and that one is more consciously attacking the problems facing young people living within a corporate-controlled mediaspace.

In Testament, these themes are part of a bigger picture. You have to remember, though, corporate advertising is the modern equivalent of religious proselytizing. Both are about spreading a particular set of memes, by any means necessary.

Will current events shape the story–is it malleable–or are you planned far into the future? I’ve read that you have four years worth of story, is that true?

Sometimes I fear that my story is shaping current events. I wrote about those riots in France just a few weeks before they started happening. And the showdown with Iran, as well as the new Mid East conflict are prefigured in there, too. If anything, I’ve been going back and changing things to make them *less* like what’s happening in the world around us.

But that’s the problem you always face when you write about a future taking place basically the day after tomorrow. If you’re really in the groove about it, you end up predicting a whole lot. It’s the kind of thing that would earn me a lot of money if I were a stock market type. But it’s unnerving as a writer, because in the six months between the time I write something and the comic actually gets published, stuff that would have seemed so “prescient” just looks ripped from the headlines.

Still, the object of the game for me is not to prove my own ability to prophesize, but to demonstrate the Bible’s ability to so accurately reflect what’s going on right now. And to the extent I can do that, I’ll be proving its writers pretty damn prophetic, at that.