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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: Graphic Novels

Episode 458: A Discussion of Lynda Barry’s Syllabus (with Leslie Salas)!

06 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Episode, Graphic Novels, Gutter Space

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Episode 458 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

In this week’s show, Leslie Salas and I discuss Lynda Barry’s composition book-inspired musings on art, Syllabus, and how not just craft, but creativity itself is a skill.

TEXT DISCUSSED

NOTES

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #102: Maid in Le Mans

23 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, Graphic Novels, History

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Tags

Katie Skelly, Maids

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #102 by Drew Barth

Maid in Le Mans

Comics are well suited to depicting historical events. In her most recent work, Maids, Katie Skelly brings us the story of the Papin Sisters—two women who murdered the mother and daughter of the Lancelin family in 1930s France.

Maids is the story of former nuns and current maids, Christine and Lea Papin, and their lives before murder has crossed their minds. Or, at least, before we’re aware that murder has crossed their minds. Growing up with an absent father and alcoholic mother, the sisters had little choice in joining a nunnery. From there, the sisters are split as Christine is hired as a maid for the Lancelin family, leaving Lea alone and desolate. Soon, the sisters reunite as maids for the same family—one of the only moments we see the sisters truly happy together.

That moment, and after they’ve murdered the family they work for.

But even as the Papin Sisters are covered in the blood of the two women they’ve murdered, we still feel a certain kind of sympathy for them. For they most part, they are women with a bond who had nothing else in the world but each other. They were alone and any mistake as maids would have landed them on the streets. It’s that kind of tension that Skelly works with so well throughout Maids. Those anxieties link right into how Skelly displays the roots of those feelings as well. With only a handful of panels, she is able to establish the Papin Sister’s previous home life and their time at the convent—all of which were fraught with alcoholism and abuse by the very people you would expect to harbor some compassion.

The final two pages of this graphic novel are going to sit with me for a while. Christine and Lea get ready for bed after the murder, speak in unison, and sit in the bed in the dark with their eyes open. It’s a testament to the uncanny nature of the story. As real as this event was, it gives the readers enough distance to still be shocked by the text at the end outlining the sisters’ deaths after being arrested. It is an obscure point in history not many are familiar with, but it’s the kind of event that works so well in the uncanny medium of comics.

Get excited. Get that blood off your blouse.


Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Episode 407: Nathan Holic!

22 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Florida Literature, Graphic Novels, Literature of Florida

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bright Lights Medium-Sized City, Burrow Press, Nathan Holic, Orlando

Episode 407 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing.)

This week, I talk to my friend and colleague Nathan Holic about his new novel that is a true epic of our hometown (Orlando), Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City.

Nathan Holic

Nathan Holic at an undisclosed location in Orlando, without a beer.

This is Nathan’s 8th appearance on TDO!

TEXT DISCUSSED

Bright Lights Medium Sized City15 Views of OrlandoAmerican Fraternity Man

NOTES

  • This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

typewriter

  • If you are in Orlando on February 29, come to the Typewriters and Jazz Write-in from 1-3 PM being held at Jack Kerouac’s old residence (from when On the Road came out).

Episode 407of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing.)

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #56: The Comic Nebula

05 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, Graphic Novels

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #56 by Drew Barth

The Comic Nebula

I mentioned last week how Nextwavewas unique due to its theme song, so what can we do with a graphic novel that includes a tiny vinyl record that can accompany a reading? Quite a lot, actually, as John Pham’s J+K has shown us.

jk1

J+K is the most unique graphic novel I have ever seen or read. From its pages, we have the story of Jay and Kay—two friends living together in a world of oddity and spectacular color. But hidden among the book’s covers are the other materials—a full issue of Cool magazine with subscription inserts and a pull-out poster, baseball cards, an ad for the local mall, a poster for the video game Dance Warrior, and a vinyl single for the band Gaseous Nebula. These materials assist in creating a sense of place within the world of J+K, and take this book from a graphic novel to a box of culture from another dimension.

jk2

As an illustrator, Pham utterly disarms throughout J+K’s style—bright, colorful, and the kind of cartoons that recalls Peanutsand Hanna-Barbera. The world Jay and Kay live in mirrors our own in its veneer of simplicity hiding a dimension of emotional, dramatic depth.

jk3

In a world filled with sapient back acne, bookstores with shelves larger than many buildings, and characters whose faces are primarily eggs, there is a sense throughout that feels fantastical until the world comes crashing down upon the reader. J+K is one of the best graphic novels due to how it uses that complete world to build up characters who make us feel their joy, sadness, and nostalgia so effortlessly. Get excited. Build a world.


drew-barth-mbfi

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #34: A Shorter Piece

04 Wednesday Sep 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, Graphic Novels, manga

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #34 by Drew Barth

A Shorter Piece

Many of the works discussed in this blog over the past months have been long-running series or graphic novels. And all of those have been great. There’s an expansiveness to many of those works. In a way, many of these series act like literary novels in this regard. But as a result, few comics emphasize shorter stories. Not just series of less than ten issues, but stories that aren’t even a full issue. This focus on shorter pieces is something that is seen much more often in many manga as the result of a great number of manga magazines publishing weekly. Because of this, there’s almost always overlooked collections of short manga.

Drunken-Dream

One criminally overlooked title is Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. Only recently released through Fantagraphics Books (although, alas, now out of print again), this collection maintains a continual sense of compassion and wonder throughout. Hagio herself as a creator is known for her work that would become foundational for shojo as a manga genre both in its content and style. To read through “The Willow Tree” or “Iguana Girl” is to reach deep into shojo manga’s DNA. But what these stories here do as well is show off just how effective of a short story author Hagio has been. Her characters feel inherently human from panel one, and we can see that defined arc of who they can become by the end of the piece, most notable in “Iguana Girl,” which pulls from legends of an iguana falling in love and asking a sorcerer to turn her into a woman. The story follows that woman’s daughter and the struggles of believing herself to be an iguana from birth.

Other pieces like “The Willow Tree” or “Girl on Porch with Puppy” showcase an astute understanding of how an ending of a short piece that maintains an innocence can be fraught with tragedy. Hagio creates these short pieces with an almost effortless perfection in line and panel while maintaining pitch- perfect stories.

On the other end of the content spectrum is the creator Junji Ito. Legendary for many of his longer series likeGyo,Uzumaki, and Tomei, many of those works typically include a variety of his shorter stories as well, most notably the legendary “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”

st3

Most recently, however, Ito adapted Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to much acclaim and included in that volume a larger variety of his short stories as well. Ito is known as a contemporary master of horror. From “Amigara Fault” to “The Neck Specter,” Ito’s short pieces deal heavily with the surreal and horrific that exists around us. With simple things like holes in a mountain and a house’s support beam or more bizarre premises like finding a man’s head with a six foot long neck, there’s a continual escalation of horror throughout. The art itself offers gruesome levels of detail incorporated combined with the uncanny. A fish with legs may not be the scariest idea, but with the right kind of shading and shadows, it’s up there.

st1

And then we have a work like Ken Niimura’s Henshin, a collection of short stories centered on the idea of change. What makes this collection unique is that it is a short story collection published by Image, a publisher known mostly for its monthly series. But that only speaks for the quality of the work itself. Much of the work is centered around the daily minutia of life in contemporary Japan, but typically with a small twist. A reunion between niece and uncle turns into an interview for becoming a hitman; a family enjoys a picnic when an old man asks them about suicide; a man saves the world with farts. And every single story is punctuated by this Niimura’s art that is deceptively simple in its line work but complemented by panel composition that stands up with some of the best manga of the twenty-first century. But it is Niimura’s commitment to the shorter form that lets these stories shine as delightful morsels of manga that is tough to find in many longer works.

There are avenues for shorter pieces of graphic narratives in America—many literary magazines now include short graphic works, and there are still a couple comic compilation books released seasonally, even Best American Non-Required Reading has a couple graphic narratives annually. But overall, many of those are few and far between. Western comic culture prioritizes the monthly issues or the graphic novel every couple years, not the persistence of the weekly manga magazines. One of the only consistent places to find shorter comic stories in the west is typically through the different annual series for superhero comics, but then those are limited to a specific cast of characters and worlds.

Why don’t western comics really have those avenues for shorter pieces? Series like Islandused to showcase new talent and shorter pieces, but that ended up canceled after fifteen issues. And there are still magazines like 2000 AD and Heavy Metal, but their visibility in mainstream comics isn’t as prevalent as it had been in the previous decades. To maintain a more healthy comics scene, we need these outlets for small shots of creativity—for pieces that aren’t going to be massive series or graphic novels, but short pieces that allow readers to discover something new in the medium.

Get excited. Read something short.


drew barthDrew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #19: Trauma

15 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, Graphic Novels, War

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #19 by Drew Barth

Trauma

Comics can, and should, be a space in which a multitude of subject matters and issues should be tackled. Comics are a medium in which the blending of text and visuals can make for a story that is easily accessible to a wide range of readers and, as a result, can have a far-reaching influence on the audiences that do inevitably choose to pick a book up. Couple comic’s accessibility to readers as a medium with stories that handle heavier subject matters and creators have a way in which they are able to present works with lasting impact. Graphic novels in particular are incredibly well suited this task. I’ve mentioned my love for graphic novels and the work they do previously with Kelsey Wroten’s Cannonball, and I would like to continue my undying adoration for graphic novels with Guillaume Singelin’s PTSD.

PSTD_CASE_04a.indd

PTSD centers on Jun, a veteran from a recent war in an unnamed country. After returning home, Jun, and many of the other veterans who returned with her, are shunned throughout the unnamed city they have returned to. Almost all are homeless. Almost all are addicted to painkillers or are barely able to function due to starvation. The homeless vets huddle together when they can to trade stories of the past and to keep themselves safe from a city that does not want them there. Is it topical? Considering Singelin has been working on PTSD since at least 2015 when the book was first announced, it feels even more topical than it did four years ago.

PT2

There is a distinct feel to a book like PTSD and in what it aims to do. Just from the art alone we can see the more simplified character designs, the expansive color pallet, and the Kowloon Walled City-esque setting the story takes place in. All of the above elements blend together to create both a unique image for the book as well as a distinct tone. Singelin’s art throughout PTSD typifies what Scott McCloud brought up in Understanding Comics in regards to the balance between art and story. A graphic narrative with more simplified art is a story that will likely stick to a reader more than a work with much more realistic art. The reason being that our eyes will focus more on how a character looks more than what the character is saying. Singelin uses this idea to his advantage. Although the characters have an almost cartoon-like design, the trauma they go through is all too real.

PT4 

PTSD deals with its titular disorder with a clarity and insight that is only served by the art. Violent moments stand out as gruesome and carry a weight with them that has been missing from many other recent comic works due to their focus on the shock. Singelin knows what is shocking in PTSD and instead of treating violence like something to be fetishized—Jun is shunned from the rest of the homeless vets as a result of violent vigilante actions against local gangs. Where characters would parade around someone taking justice into their own hands, the response in the world of PTSD is very different. And the fact that all of these acts of violence—from the fights in the city streets to flashbacks of active combat—are rendered in Singelin’s particular style lends the weight to these moments that many other books miss. I remember everything that happens to Jun and still feel that pressure in my chest with how hard with scenes of her at her lowest impact. 

PT3 

 PTSD is a book about struggle and the violent lengths someone will go through for revenge or survival, but it is also a book laced with hope throughout. And the kind of hope Singelin is showing the reader isn’t the sanguine or sentimental. The hope in PTSD is something that the characters build throughout the story. A restaurant owner, Leona, hands out food to the homeless not as a means of simple charity, but because she is a kind person who wants to see people doing well. And that act of kindness evolves. Soon the same people Leona was serving are partnering with her to provide vegetables they’ve been growing in small gardens. Jun’s vigilante crusade against the city’s gangs ostracize her from the rest of the veteran population, but in her amassing of medical supplies from those same gangs she becomes the single point of medical care for the whole community. And I think that’s one of the greatest strengths of PTSD. Singelin shows us the struggle and the grasping at dirt and air for any kind of relief from the hell we’ve created for ourselves, but he also shows us an alternative. The world of PTSD is in no ways perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction where we can create something lasting for ourselves. And with this book, Singelin has created a story that lasts.

Get excited. Something better is coming.


drew barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #15: Graphic Cannon

17 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, Graphic Novels

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #15 by Drew Barth

Graphic Cannon

For this blog, I’ve mainly focused on the serialized comics since I’m in A Comic Shop every Wednesday. But graphic novels are a bit different.  Their releases are scheduled like books, typically on Tuesdays or Fridays, and are new, original works that have not been previously serialized. And that brings me to a graphic novel that is coming out on April 19thfrom Uncivilized Books: Cannonball by Kelsey Wroten.

Cannonball

You may recognize Wroten’s work from The New Yorker, The New York Times, or her Instagram. But with Cannonball, we’re getting her first long-form graphic work and already it’s one of the strongest graphic novels out this year. It’s top five for me, and it’s only March.

Basics: Cannonball is about Caroline Bertram, a recent art school graduate, queer, and a “self-proclaimed tortured genius” who rips up her thesis novel to use as cat litter for a stray she picks up outside her first apartment. Caroline and her best friend, Penelope, struggle to become adults with bills, rent, jobs, and the ever-encroaching sense of dread that comes with being a newly-minted adult. Throughout Cannonball, we see Caroline dealing with failure—personal and artistic—that permeates her new adult life. And although she draws some strength from a professional wrestler, the titular Cannonball, these feelings never truly leave.

CB_001_1600.jpg

Cannonball is a graphic novel about the crushing loneliness that follows us throughout our lives. From the first to the last panel, we see Caroline alone. Even if in both of these panels she’s either in bed with someone else or at a party celebrating her achievements, she is emotionally alone in both situations. Caroline goes forward with herself, slips backwards, picks herself up, stumbles again, continues to stumble, and stumbles into success. But her success never feels forced or cheapened. Through a constant struggle, she earns every achievement she receives, and yet is never satisfied or cured by these successes.

A great moment happens toward the end of the book where Caroline talks about not being able to get a story published in the same zines she’d had stories in after getting her own book. Caroline’s art has touched people in ways she hadn’t imagined, but because she didn’t imagine her work having that impact, such success is alienating.

What Wroten works with marvelously throughout Cannonball is this existential idea of identity. Midway through the book, Caroline has an argument with her father about being an adult, about her “lifestyle” and what she plans to do with her life. It’s the kind of argument that is familiar and devastating in equal measure. Wroten’s art only heightens this tense moment with stark backgrounds, darkened panels, and onomatopoeia that floats around Caroline’s father like nagging insects.

CB_005_1600

Her father’s words physically float and haunt Caroline even after she leaves the argument, and we can’t help but feel the bile and bitterness as though we just had the argument ourselves. But it brings up questions that the rest of the book hinges on: who is Caroline going to be and what does she even want to be?

She has a constant struggle throughout to answer that question.

With Cannonball, Wroten provides us with a staggering work that can act as a guide for creating a near perfect graphic novel. From its pitch-perfect art to a story that feels familiar and achievable to Caroline’s character living and breathing in a way that is perfectly flawed and human, Cannonball is a wondrous achievement in graphic storytelling. There are so many small moments and instances throughout the book that it’s hard to talk about all of the in the scope of one article, but I do hope all of what’s written above gets you just as excited for Cannonball as I am for it.

Get excited. The best stories are happening.


drew barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Episode 333: Peter Kuper!

22 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Episode, Graphic Novels

≈ 1 Comment

Episode 333 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to Peter Kuper about Kafka, the remarkable art form of comic books, the indie comic book scene in the late 1980s, Spy Vs. Spy, finding your Muse when it leaves the marketplace, and so much more.

Kuper author photo Gray

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Kafkaesque Final color frontRuins- Cover Peter Kuper.jpg

NOTES

Check out Brian Turner, Jared Silvia, recordings of Elise Kusnetz, and others in a performance of The Interplanetary Acoustic Team at the Timucua White House in Orlando, Florida on Tuesday, September 25th.

Check out Kyle Eagle’s impeccable new jazz podcast, The Major Scale. If you search the iTunes store, you can find it there as a free download you can and should subscribe to.

Leslie Salas reviewed Peter Kuper’s adaptation of The Metamorphosis for the Drunken Odyssey back in 2013.

Details from Kafkaesque:

Kafkaesque 1Kafkaesque 2


Episode 333 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Buzzed Books #69: Home After Dark

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Graphic Novels

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Buzzed Books #69 by Joshua Begley

David Small’s Home After Dark

We often forget that growing up is a terrifying process. As adults, looking at children, all we can see is the amazing vistas of possibility. A child has the potential to be anything, and when you’re long past childhood, that plethora of potentiality is alluring, almost intoxicating, and we sometimes wish we could go back to that time, before we became locked into who we are now.

That point of view is part truth and part romantic fantasizing. For many children, the future is a terrifying prospect. It’s the terror of the unknown, the terror of having too many choices. The terror of going against parents, friends, and society to forge a new and different path.

David Small Home After Dark

This terror permeates David Small’s Home After Dark (Liveright, 2018). Set in the 1950s, the graphic novel follows Russel, a thirteen-year-old boy. After his mother runs away with his father’s best friend, Russel and his father travel to California to forge a new life.

At first, the plan is to stay with his Aunt June in Pasadena. For reasons unknown, June refuses to let them stay when they finally arrive. She tells Russel’s father that there are no jobs in Southern California, and he should head north. They end up in a small town called Marshfield and end up renting a room with the Mahs, a Chinese immigrant family who own a restaurant in Little China Harbor.

Things seem to pick up when Russel’s father finds a job teaching English at San Quentin penitentiary (“Teaching Shakespeare to the inmates, huh?”). He gets a G.I. loan and buys a house, and Russel settles in as best he can into this new life. What follows is a tale of increasing quiet desperation as Russel’s father grows more and more bitter with his life and situation, and Russel struggles to discover who he is and what he wants out of life. The compelling and sad truth to this story is neither of them truly discover the answers to those questions.

Again, it all comes back to the future and the potential it holds. Russel’s father thought going west would allow for him to carve out a better future, but he was wrong. Instead of an uplifting Horatio Alger story of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, Russel’s father self-sabotages himself at every turn. The comic never puts us in his head, because it’s all from Russel’s point of view, but there’s a real sense of a man trapped in a world not of his making, but still of his own design. The scars of the past and the coping mechanisms of the present give way to a systematic dismantling of the future, and the greater tragedy here is that Russel might well be on the same path.

Tied into all of this is the question of masculinity. Russel—a frightened boy whose life gets upended time and time again—doesn’t fit the cultural script of 1950s masculinity, and because of that, he’s perpetually bullied and his sexuality questioned. He even experiences a homosexual encounter with the first friend he makes, and immediately shuns the friend afterward. I’d like to tell you that at the end Russel discovers who he is, what he wants, and learns to stand on his own two feet, but this isn’t that type of story. Home After Dark poses questions and doesn’t provide any easy answers, and it’s all the stronger for it. Like Russel, like his father, like his friends, you have to discover your own truth and your own path. No one can do that for you.

Home After Dark Detail

Small employs a loose artistic style to tell this tale—more cartoony than photorealistic. The style works for the story, because it fits the narrative and overall premise. For the most part, the backgrounds aren’t filled in, save for a few specific images to anchor the pages, and the minimalist style for the characters helps Small define them in as few lines as possible. Small also uses a great deal of negative space and plays around with the gutters depending upon the emotional context of the page. It’s a style that, at first blush, looks simple and perhaps a little unsophisticated, but it’s actually nothing of the sort. Every line has purpose in this piece, and it’s one of the aspects that makes this such a compelling work of fiction.

The back cover of this work features a quote from the legendary Jules Feiffer, who compares this work to The Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye. While I can see that, I couldn’t help but think of The Outsiders more than those other two works. The main difference here is that I have no idea if Russel will “stay golden.” I’m not even sure that he was golden in the first place. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that he goes on and finds himself, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.


Joshiua Begley

Joshua Begley (Episode 284) teaches Creative Writing at Full Sail University. He has been published in Ghost Parachute, The Cut-Thru Review, and in the anthology Other Orlandos. He also writes reviews for The Fandom Post and Inside Pulse.

Heroes Never Rust #48: War at Home

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Heroes Never Rust, Violence

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Tags

Alan Moore, Saving Private Ryan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Violence

Heroes Never Rust #48 by Sean Ironman

War at Home

This morning, I watched the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. My internet was down and I decided to check out what DVDs I had while I ate breakfast. I don’t know why I chose Saving Private Ryan. It’s been years since I’ve seen the film. I only watched the first twenty minutes or so. I left off a couple of minutes after Tom Hanks and his crew make it off the beach and start obliterating Nazis in retreat. I was fourteen when the movie was released and I thought the battle scenes were the best part. Explosions. Limbs blown off. A Nazi throwing his hands up and surrendering just to be gunned down. It was good action and that’s what I was looking for. But I’m old now and tired. Today when I watched the film, it was horrific. Not just because people were dying. Not because I understand that real people had to go through this. Before I turned it off and went to start my work for the day, a few Nazis began to run away. About three of them were in their trenches, not firing, just running. Running to safety. Running home. Running from death. And then, about two dozen U.S. soldiers, who are above the retreaters on solid ground, gun them down. As a kid, I probably cheered when that happened. Take that Nazis! But watching it now, there was something so animalistic about it. I understand these same Nazis were killing American soldiers just a few minutes earlier. But I felt the scene showed what war does to a person, how it changes a person, how it destroys everything.

Untitled 1

In the conclusion to volume one of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, war has come. Professor Moriarty’s airship bombs Limehouse, which is engulfed in flames by page two. In the opening, Moriarty says in regards to the cavorite, “This wonderful, celestial material…It’s given me the sky, this element that I was surely born for. Ah, Sergeant, does your soul thrill as mine does to these seas of cloud, to this God-like perspective? To this God-like power?” Moriarty is an evil son-of-a-bitch. He even comments on the “countless tiny lives” below before commencing the bombing. He must kill thousands this issue. And for what? So he can defeat a rival crime lord? As the neighborhood is burning to the ground, I no longer see Kevin O’Neill’s beautiful artwork. Even though it’s fiction, I think about all those people who were sitting down to dinner, who were getting ready for bed after a long day working construction. They have no stake in what’s happening. And now, they’re dead.

Untitled 2

When the Chinese crime lord, The Doctor, sees the destruction, he orders his troops to attack. They fly at Moriarty’s airship with their own personal flying devices. I feel bad for them. What do they get out of this? They fly to their death, and from what we see later, it is a gruesome death. Nemo and Mr. Hyde lay out what looks to be hundreds of men. In the end, when the league wins, and of course they win, men fall to their deaths. And, again, for what? Because two crime lords can’t get along? What’s a crime lord any way, other than an asshole? What’s he a lord of? We’re smart people. How does someone lord over us? Why would anyone follow these mad men? They can’t pay well. The hours must suck. Who’s dream in life is it to work for a crime lord? To kill for someone else? I say if The Doctor and Moriarty can’t get along, then let them fight, but leave everyone else out of it. They can kill each other all they want, but London would be safe. The battle is made worse because people follow the villains. The villains themselves can do barely any damage. It’s the numbers of men, the numbers of bombs. Moriarty didn’t make those bombs, or his airship. He didn’t load those guns, sharpen those swords. He told someone else to do it, and someone else did as they were told. Why?

In the television show Game of Thrones, Varys poses a riddle to Tyrion. I couldn’t find the quote for the show, but riddle in the books is: “In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?” The sellsword has the power over the three men. He can kill them all or just walk away. Yet, people go on and pretend the other men have the power, and most people do what others tell them.

Untitled 3

At the end of volume one, the league triumphs. Moriarty is beaten. London is saved. But it all seems so anticlimactic. It was all for nothing. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of Moore’s script. That’s just he way things are. A couple of crazy, power-hungry men cause destruction, and then we’re left to clean things up.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard about things. Maybe I should just look at the pretty pictures and be in awe of how the league fights their way through the masses of soldiers to win the battle. I can say that it’s pretty cool, and I enjoy the comic greatly. But maybe I’m just tired. Tired of seeing new mass shootings on the news. Tired of soldiers killing people. Even tired of people who do work they don’t love just because they’re following what other people tell them to do. No one can tell us what to do. I think from time to time about superheroes in our own world. If they would be helpful or not. But we wouldn’t really need them if we just did what we know is right. The league of extraordinary gentlemen would have no purpose. Maybe if the league didn’t have to fight these mindless battles, Mina could fight for equal rights of women. Nemo can fight against England’s treatment of India. But I guess the important things will have to wait. A little orb that makes things float seems to be much more important.

___________

Sean Ironman

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

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