We Are The Boys

Dave Gibbons, the co-creator of Watchmen, writes and draws The Originals, a vibrant new graphic novel about youth, maturity, and the need to belong at any cost.  Lel (nee Leslie), a teenager in a retro-futuristic England circa the mid-1960s, desperately wants to join the Originals, a band of hoverscooter-riding Mods in all but name.  He soon gets his wish after he takes part in a bloody feud with a rival gang, the Dirt - and that's when the real story begins.

Gibbons takes a considerable risk by focalizing his story through such an unreflective narrator.  Lel tends to caption his scenes with nonprofundities like "Saying goodbye to Viv was always hard" or "This was going to be some weekend."  These statements don't ring false for the teenage narrator, but they make for a flat narration.  Fortunately, Gibbons can rely on his art to convey all the subtleties of plot and tone that his protagonist can't articulate.

The book's most immediately striking feature is its coloring, in a grayscale so varied it can accomodate both the gloom of postwar England and the hopped-up energy of Mod.  The color's greatest set piece is probably an op-art drug trip initially reminiscent of Steranko, but Gibbons makes the scene his own through brilliant use of silhouettes, diagonal compositions, and random aspect-to-aspect panel transitions that keep the eye moving around the page, endlessly off-balance.

The story is also served well by Gibbons' command of space and detail.  The panels vary from small, intimate boxes to widescreen, full-bleed tiers to awestruck double-page spreads, each size matched to the content.  But the spaces within the panels are even more important, as they flesh out the world Lel is too fully immersed in to describe.

It's a world in which the brutalist modernism of skyscrapers, apartment blocks, and nuclear cooling towers is slowly edging out older architecture that still bears the traces of a devastating war.  (You almost feel sorry for the defiantly retro Dirt; history doesn't seem to be on their side.)  From the hellish cityscape that opens the book to the brief glimpse we get of Lel's cramped home, Gibbons creates a claustrophobic urban atmosphere, yet he also breeds a lifelong resident's sense of familiarity. The book's two most important locations both appear on the first page, and the dialogue tells you how to get from one to the other.  By the end of the book, we know these streets almost as well as Lel does.

But ultimately it's the level of detail that proves most rewarding.  On my second reading - after the first, breathless one to find out how it all turns out - I kept flipping back and forth to follow all the little indicators Gibbons uses to distinguish between otherwise identical gang members and to tell the stories that Lel can't or won't relate. (Watch for Dink's casual abandonment of his girlfriend Sharon.)  Simple things like the reappearance of an expensive outfit or the design of a hover - from Warren's tricked-out ride to Bok's unadorned secondhand model - say far more about their owners than anything Lel could tell us.  The consistency of detail creates the impression of a cohesive world, but more importantly, it also conveys the truths that are too deep or troublesome for Lel to acknowledge.

The sycophantic wannabe Warren, for example, wants in the Originals so desperately that he copies Lel's clothing, an act of plagiarism that doesn't escape Lel's notice and figures prominently in the plot.  What Lel doesn't tell us, though, and wouldn't tell us, is that he's done the same thing with Ronnie, the wealthy, handsome, faintly sinister leader of the Originals.  Lel buys the same style of jackets, takes over Ronnie's old job as an amphetamine dealer, and even purchases his hoverscooter.  His identification with Ronnie is in some ways more total than Warren's with him.

But in a crucial and equally unspoken distinction, Lel goes about it in the right way: earning Ronnie's approval, working his way up the Originals hierarchy, wearing clothes just slightly different from his idol's.  Warren tries to buy his way in with a ludicrously overdecorated hover (it's a gift from his Auntie) and a mantle and shades that directly mimic Lel's.  When that fails to win Lel and Bok's approval he resorts to more drastic measures, trying to cement his reputation with a hideous and cowardly escalation of violence.  These distinctions are so obvious to Lel that, in the truest sign of insiderism, he neglects to mention them.  Gibbons' relentlessly realistic art doesn't just supply the missing information, it quietly alerts us when Lel's hazy, romanticized narration is leaving something out.  We're left to piece it all together and wonder whether, if Lel had treated Warren the way Ronnie treated him, things would have ended differently.

If the book has one major drawback, it's that Gibbons doesn't convey any sense of why Lel wants so badly to be an Original, except that it means being in.  Which is perhaps the point - but why does he want to be an Original, and not a Dirt?  Why this style, this group, this girl, this friend?  We understand Lel's desires in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

Again, part of this may be Gibbons' point.  The final scene plays out before a blanked-out bit of graffiti:  All _________ are wankers.  Perhaps the names and groups are interchangeable; all that matters is us and them, that you hate someone else and they hate you.  Lel says he's learned his lesson, but the last line and the final double-page spread (if it can be called that) bring even that into question.  It's a punch in the gut, the most bitter and potent ending I've read in some time.  Do yourself a favor and don't flip straight to the end - earn the moment, as Lel does.  Or doesn't.

The Originals creatively exploits comics' tension between art and narration, which you might expect from the artist behind Watchmen, but with a difference; this time, the tension lies between what's shown and what's not said.  The result is a comic that balances between fantasy and autobiography, delusion and recrimination, the energy of youth and the sobriety of age.  It's one of the best and certainly one of the most accomplished comics of the year.

Comments

[Todd Murry]

Hi Marc,

For some reason, there has not been much talk about this book online. Could be the cost, I guess, but I think many who read it probably wanted to say something nice about what is obviously a labor of love for Gibbons, but were a bit uninspired by the thing.

I agree with you in that there is alot of good stuff here, mostly in the nice greytone art and the visual character bits. But I'm left a bit cold by it, mostly because he fails to pull together the stray bits of what reads like a morality tale into a satisfying ending. I would have been happy with the story either having a point - any point - or it clearly refusing to have a point as a statement of some sort, but the main character somehow feels incapable of coming to any kind of mental conclusion as to "what's it all about."

There was a good deal of interest here. From what I've read, Gibbons remembers his past involved in a similar "hate the others because they wear different clothes" mod background very fondly, and I suspected this was going to be an attempt to resolve (or at least examinethe conflict between) his fond memories, and what he likely feels, with hindsight, are the repugnant aspects. Although he gets a point or two from the lack of rose tinted glasses when representing the negative aspects of "his past," It doesn't feel like, at the end of the day, that he has said anything about it.

I'm not advocating an ABC afterschool special ending forking over a moral lesson, the ending we get just seems listless. Lel just does't seem sharp enough to make provide the self analysis we need for the ending.

[Jon]

I was wondering what Gibbons was up too.

The Originals creatively exploits comics' tension between art and narration, which you might expect from the artist behind Watchmen, but with a difference; this time, the tension lies between what's shown and what's not said.

This just makes it a "must get" for me!

[Marc]

Hi Todd,

While I wasn't wholly satisfied by The Originals either (the friend/girlfriend conflict didn't do much for me; thankfully it was shuffled offstage for the more interesting revenge plot), I thought the ending made the comic.

I agree that Lel isn't introspective enough to come to any sort of conclusions, and in a nice contrast to the steely resolve he displays in the final scenes he appears not to have learned anything at all from his experiences. But Gibbons is sharp enough, he knows what Lel's missing, and that disconnect between the author's insights and the narrator's is what makes the ending so wonderfully harsh.

I'm also surprised I haven't seen more discussion of this book. If the price has been the barrier, I'd encourage everyone who's interested to buy it for themselves for the holidays. (The nice fat discounts at Amazon or Barnes & Noble might help with that.) I'm extremely glad I did.

[Tyler]

Looks like a good read I'll have to fo to my local bookstore and grab it