In his recent review of Demo #6, Johnny Bacardi voiced an interesting concern about the series overall:
OK, I understand that there is no overarching theme. nothing which will tie all these individual stories together, that these are just random, one-off looks at different young people with powers and abilities and how they cope (or fail to cope) with them. Nothing wrong with this, but it just causes a bit of a wish, in my mainstream-comics addled brain, that there was a underlying reason (a point, if you will) for all this, and it wasn’t just random instances of “young guy or gal has powers, young guy or gal gets into situation because of powers, young guy or gal deals with powers and faces the future, whatever it may be”.
Interesting, I say, because it literally never occurred to me to complain about this facet of the book. To me, this is not a bug–it’s a feature.
I realized three or four years ago that even the most seemingly anti-authoritarian genre fiction almost inevitably involves a safety valve in the form of a wise old man (or indeed a secret society of wise old men) that explains it all to our at-first befuddled hero. The tormented mutants of the X-verse have Professor X; bullied & abused Harry Potter has Dumbledore and the rest of the Hogwart’s faculty; terminally perplexed Neo has Morpheus and company; bored, sheltered Luke Skywalker has Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda; terrified Frodo has Gandalf; hell, even in the Illuminatus! trilogy the characters have Hagbard Celine and Malaclypse the Elder. No matter how cruel and terrifying the world gets, no matter how bizarre and wondrous your newfound powers are, there’s always someone around to explain the New, Secret, and Real Grand Scheme of Things, and exactly where you fit into it.
In “mainstream,” superhero comics, this can be taken to epic extremes, perhaps paradoxically because of the unruly, hobbled-together nature of the big superhero universes. (DC is famously Frankensteinian, and for all its reputation as a single, cohesive universe, Marvel certainly wasn’t conceived as such, and contains enough disparate concepts to make doing so difficult. I mean, Spider-Man has fought J. Jonah Jameson, the Punisher, the Hulk, Loki, and Galactus, hasn’t he?) The Quintessence, the Earth X saga–these are ways of assuring both character and reader (and writer) that nothing is so weird as to not have a (relatively) rational, well-defined slot to plug right into. Obviously, there’s an appeal to this approach–cohesiveness can be a fascinating thing, if the works cohere in an unexpected, thought-provoking fashion–but I can’t help but feel that some of both the potential for formal inventiveness and the thrill of the truly unknown and unexplained and therefore unbowed and untamed is lost when such devices are employed.
Moreover, I must admit that my own experience of the universe has shown me no wise men, no secret society with all the right answers. Heck, my conception of God doesn’t even gel with such things. As near as I can tell, things happen because they happen, not because of some Plan, not because of the Way Things Really Are as hidden behind some curtain of conspiratorial secrecy which, were I suddenly granted extraordinary powers, my forebears and brothers-in-arms would make themselves known to me in order to reveal. It’s just life. It just is.
I’m certainly not the first person to point out that there’s something extremely and perversely comforting about conspiracy theory. I believe it was Robert Anton Wilson who theorized that the conspiracist mindset is a modern-day replacement for belief in God: “There’s no benevolent All-Father pulling the strings, but there is a top-secret cabal of Freemasons and aliens!” If you don’t believe in the Pope, you can at least believe in the Bildebergers. You see this reflected nearly everywhere, especially in this day and age, where the terrible events of 9/11 and its aftershocks find some people desperate to create an overarching explanation–someone must have known something and used this knowledge to make something else happen–rather than face the idea that, well, we’re all just pretty much on our own. Further, in fiction and in life, some people posit themselves as anti-conspiracy; however, a quick look reveals them to be proponents not of anti-authoritarianism, but of the right kind of authoritarianism. (The comics blogosphere has recently debated whether, say, Warren Ellis is such a person.) Additionally, you see another reflection of this mindset in criticism of “messy” fiction, fiction where not everything is played out in neat little story arcs that tie up all the plotlines in a way that enables the reader or audience to perfectly contextualize all that has gone before–in other words, fiction that’s a lot like life. (My favorite example of this is the vitriol directed at Seasoun Four of The Sopranos. To me, this is maybe the finest work of fiction I’ve ever encountered; to many TV critics, this was a disaster–“Where were the arcs? Why didn’t anything happen?” (Such were the complaints when the critics weren’t busy bemoaning the lack of murders, which I think tells you quite a bit about many TV critics and their real reason for enjoying the first couple of seasons of the show.)) Such outlooks are the metafictional equivalent of comfort food. This is not to say they’re totally horrible, of course–that’s some good food, oftentimes. But it is comforting, a lot more so than the notion that there is no explanation.
In the big fiction project that I’ve been working on for the last few years, this is something I’ve very consciously built the story around. No wise men are forthcoming. No ancient underground group of mind-warriors will swoop out of nowhere to show the protagonists the Men Behind the Curtain. No curtain, no men. Even the de rigeur explanation of “the source of the disturbances”–science? genetics? magic?–is eschewed. I mean, how often do you get one of those in real life?
This, then, is what I find so refreshing about Demo. As near as I can tell there are no connections between its superpowered protagonists. The powers will never be explained, and the characters will never meet each other, nor some old bald guy who’s been running around in the superpower underground since World War II or the Victorian Era or whatever. Whatever meaning the characters glean from their extraordinary situations is just that–gleaned from their own life experiences, not from received truth or prepackaged schematics as to how everything works. It’s all up to them.
How wonderful!
(PS: If there’s a flaw with Demo’s approach, it’s not that no answers are found, but that it doesn’t seem that the characters are searching for them. Personally, I feel that the quest for the wise old man and his bag of explanations is so culturally ingrained in us that were anyone to actually be given super powers, they’d almost automatically being looking for the secret government installation or circle of occult adepts that could help them explain and control their powers, and subsequently enlist them in the battle against whatever it is people with powers are supposed to battle against. The inevitable disappointment is part of the game, you know? But maybe that’s just me.)
(PPS: Demo #6, by the way, is the strongest issue of the series yet. Its horror elements are what grabbed me, as I’m sure you’d expect, and though I’m not sure I was ever “scared” (I didn’t see the Kubrick’s-Shining influence that the artist cited), I certainly remained grabbed. The first appearance of the mysterious skeleton is bracingly surreal, and the shots of the decaying dogs are powerful and grotesque. The added element of genuine oppression, rather than run-of-the-mill suburban ennui, makes the character moments both more believable and more relatable, and gives the horrific events the selling power they need. And Becky Cloonan’s art is at its best, emerging from its influences into its own dynamic, calligraphic territory. And it’s not just the terrifying stuff she nails, either–the protagonist’s bonnie new bride, for example, is refreshingly human and real, a woman you could quite conceivably fall in love with as opposed to the usual Brechtian device connoting “PRETTINESS.” Impressive and unique from top to bottom, if this issue is, as author Brian Wood says, the template for the remainder of the series, we’re in for some very good comics.)