Review: Give Me Liberty

A young woman survives deprivation, war and political machinations in this bleak and charmless work.

‘Black humour’ must be among the most over-used, mis-represented descriptions of creative failure; usually it is heavy on the blackness and low on humour. ‘Political satire’ falls into the same category and few works have the political insight to justify the claim.

The comics industry owes Frank Miller a debt of gratitude. Miller's noir stamp on Daredevil and then Batman, in the 1980s, breathed fresh air into stale franchises and ushered in a new ‘gritty’ era of comics.

DC published Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 1986, the same year as Watchmen. Liberating and fresh, these works seemed to demonstrate the potential of the comics medium to express adult ideas and stories. Unfortunately, the industry's vogue for ‘dark’ and ‘mature’ themes led them to fill their comics with gratuitous violence, cynicism and exploitative misogyny.

These qualities, always nascent in Miller's stories, came to dominate them. Miller's work never again hit the heights of Dark Knight and has increasingly come to parody itself.

Set in a dystopian near future, Give Me Liberty follows the adventures of Martha Washington, a black girl from a violent Chicago slum, who joins the US army and becomes a war hero. Martha's story provides a through-line for the degeneration of the US government and the internal political struggles.

Give Me Liberty is replete with gags. For example, Martha takes her name (presumably) from George Washington's wife. The US Army is renamed PAX - latin for 'peace' - ironically recalling the Pax Romana, the 'Roman Peace', a period of relative tranquility during the time of the Roman Empire.

There is no shortage of ideas - the title comes from Patrick Henry's famous insurrectionary quote 'Give me liberty or give me Death!' - but quite what Miller wants us to take from them, beyond the obvious 'irony' is unclear.

And if Miller’s work is not particularly nuanced or insightful of politics, at times it is very funny. The space-station occupied by ‘Aryan Thrust’ - a group of militant extremists, who assert that ‘the future is white, fascist and gay’ - takes the form of a gigantic phallus. Miller seems to want to say something about men, but what?

Indeed, apart from Martha there are almost no women in Give Me Liberty. With the exception of Elektra, Miller often conforms to the comic industry’s exploitative portrayal of women. Martha is no sex object, but nor is she much of a woman; her value lies in her malleability to the ends of power and her effective use of force.

The world of Give Me Liberty is not quite a Hobbesian war of all against all, but force is the idiom of society, power its highest value. Miller wants to say something about men, but he presents again an assemblage of ideas, without a strong organising principle.

Martha Washington herself is kept in a kind of developmental stasis. We learn little about her, or her motivations, other than her facility for killing and surviving. Martha is the still point, around which the chaos of the story revolves. It is tempting to see this as a kind of Forrest Gump move on Miller’s part; while Moretti, the ambitious military man, manoeuvres himself into power Martha fights and survives his wars.

It seems that Miller wants to have his cake and eat it. Power is shown to cruelly brutalise and instrumentalise, but Miller relishes in the violence which is Martha's sole purpose in life.

On the plus side, the storytelling in Give Me Liberty is expert, in particular the pacing, which moves along slickly. And Dave Gibbon's charismatic artwork evokes Watchmen. If only we could remember the brilliant visual style and storytelling Miller introduced to comics and forget what he has to say.

Review: The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

The death of their mentor reunites a fractious group of estranged superheroes for a new challenge.

Few comics in recent years have attracted so much critical excitement and popular adoration as The Umbrella Academy. Undoubtedly, one reason for this is that it is written by Gerard Way, lead singer of rock group My Chemical Romance.

Way is by no means a dilletante, idly turning his hand to a quaint medium. Before rock called, Way went to art school, aiming to work in comics and produced original artwork for the series; he has since gone on to write on Spiderman and other comics titles and The Umbrella Academy is now into its second series.

Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba was draughted in to illustrate The Umbrella Academy. His line work is reminiscent of Duncan Fegredo's work on Hellboy, angular, clean and simple, but never terse or mechanical, thanks to its hand-drawn style.

Ba shares with Fegredo the good fortune to have his work coloured by Dave Stewart (who coloured Fegredo's art in Hellboy: The Wild Hunt). Stewart's colouring looks like overlaid cutouts of craft paper in muted tones, with occasional bright hues (as above). The result is textured, atmospheric and stunning.

The story concerns a seven orphaned mutants raised to be a super team, by the eccentric and steely Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Years later, long since estranged from one another, they gather for Hargreeves's funeral, and before long sibling tensions surface. Before long they are saving the world.

The Umbrella Academy is quirky without being affected or mannered. It does not break genres, and it recalls many other comics, but (in its emphasis on family dynamics and emotional relationships) there is a tenderness to its storytelling. This is not to say there is not plenty of action and adventure, but here is a rare example of a comic which - like a great superhero team - is greater than the sum of its parts.

Review: The Legend of Mother Sarah

Sarah’s search for her children leads to a startling discovery

I’m not well read in Manga (though I loved Ranma ½ and Oh My Goddess!), but even I know of Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira. So it was with interest that I read The Legend of Mother Sarah: Tunnel Town, one of Otomo’s lesser known works.

Mother Sarah is set in a distant future, in which warfare has left the Earth irradiated and uninhabitable. A radical group, Epoch, has managed to tilt the planet’s axis and expose new land for settlement.

The titular Sarah scours the scattered settlements looking for the children she was separated from during the outbreak of civil war for control over the new Earth.

While the questing plot is familiar within the genre, Mother Sarah explores some unusual themes. For example, I can think of few comics that deal with motherhood or feature women in middle age (except as supporting characters).

Apart from delivering the occasional ass-kicking, Sarah’s special ‘power’ is her ability to offer motherly guidance to the two young people she befriends in Tunnel Town, a mining colony run by the fascistic government and operated by slaves/prisoners of war.

Sarah is a catalytic character; the actual protagonist is a young soldier in the totalitarian regime, who longs to prove himself to his seniors, and the young girl who looks up to him.

The squalor of war is more well-trodden ground in comics, but Sarah herself, while vaguely sympathetic to the Epoch faction and opposed to the fascists, is unconcerned with the political claims of either. Seldom are the Epoch freedom fighters portrayed in a more flattering light than the greedy fascists.

Sarah eschews explicit moral or political stances for a more general sense of compassion for all war’s victims.

Although the storytelling of Mother Sarah is simple and direct, which would seem to make it ideal for younger readers, it is super violent; everybody gets shot in the face. (There is also one panel of porn in the middle of the book, which is random.)

The artwork took a while for me to get used to. It is black and white and very low key, which allows for high detail, but could wash out the compositions. I was surprised to find the result was a flawlessly smooth read; the eye was not arrested every couple of panels or even pages, but was allowed to 'scroll' through the story easily. This is the first time I have really paid close attention to the 'cinematic' effect of Manga that Scott McCloud speaks about in Understanding Comics.

Mother Sarah may not be a classic, but it is highly original in its conception and immaculate in its production.

Review: The Horror of Collier County

A good try, but this tale of suburban paranoia lacks meat (cadaverous or otherwise).

It is unfair, perhaps, to judge a book by what it is not, rather than what it is. This is the fine line that criticism treads. No Platonic ideal of what a Graphic Novel should be guides the reader, but expectations are always there. The physical object itself creates them, even without reading it, by its titles, titles, pictures and graphic style, its volume, the feel of its pages.

Rich Tomasso’s The Horror of Collier County starts promisingly, when the car of a young, single mother is beset by alligators. This sets the stage for a mild mystery, in which the young woman investigates the strange hostility of her mother’s neighbourhood, with the help of a friendly local. In fact the Strangeness of Collier County might be a better title for the comic.

To my mind The Horror of Collier Country (its very title suggestive of HP Lovecraft and John Collier) promised a surreal, post-Buffy world, stalked by demons, zombies, unnameable evils, perhaps. Although Tomasso does a good job of building a creepy atmosphere, there is little payoff for it; the undead, unearthly or incomprehensible make few appearances.

This is a brief story in a minor key, which is fine. Unfortunately the relationships between the characters lack depth and drama and with the weird elements being so low-key, the story feels a bit flat. I wanted more background.

Having said all that, Tomasso has a sweet graphic style - redolent of Dan Clowes and Jay Stephens - both economical and free. Notwithstanding a few narrative glitches, The Horror is paced and designed well, with the occasional splash page making good impact. Bearing in mind that The Horror was Tomasso’s first graphic novel, the quality of the artwork alone would encourage me to read more of his work.