
Eightball #23, "The Death-Ray," begins in a mode all too common to the work of Daniel Clowes, with the lamentations of insufferably jaded losers. Meet our protagonist, Andy:
I guess I don't have a lot in common with most other kids. I don't really like rock music or TV shows.... It's my opinion that most people don't really care about music anyway, that they just want to be part of the "cool crowd," which is okay, I guess. My trouble is I can never really find a group I want to join.
One might object by saying that this cliched anomie belongs Andy, not Clowes, that Clowes presents these tired sentiments for scrutiny, not emulation. And he does, but that misses the point: any critique of Andy's detached, adolescent viewpoint is just as redundant, just as tiresome as Andy's critiques of the cool crowd. Had "The Death-Ray" stayed on this tedious register, dutifully charting the psychology of a Salinger stereotype, there would be little to recommend it.
The story's power lies in its connection of Andy's dangerous self-absorption to America's current relationship with the rest of the world. Andy's isolation as a teenager melds seamlessly into his fantasies of becoming a superhero, which in turn feed into the fantasies of victimization and vengeance necessary to justify his violent acts, which themselves settle into a petulant, distinctly middle-aged isolation that feels more Dirty Harry than Spider-Man ("Who am I? Your worst nightmare"). One leads inexorably to the next, so that by the time Clowes is openly addressing current events - titling one section "The United States of Andy" leaves us little wiggle room - he's created the impression that a posture of wounded, isolationist militarism is just as adolescent as young Andy and Louie's dreams of blowing up the world.
It's no accident that the Death-Ray's costume so closely resembles that of Spider-Man, who became (in the wildly successful movie) America's first post-September 11th superhero, or that Andy would begin his costumed career with an Uncle Ben-style fantasy in which he imagines his grandfather has been shot, a tragedy that would grant him license to exact brutal revenge.
Andy and his partner Louie prefer to think they commit their actions on behalf of others: Janet Mastroserio, Theresa and Sonny, Dinah and her daughter, "the weak, the innocent, the unloved, and the friendless." (The last two items in Andy's list seem more evocative of Andy himself, perhaps a sign of who he's really serving.) By the present day, when Andy has isolated himself completely and has no more friends to watch over, he claims to be looking out for us, "Mr. and Mrs. Decent Citizen," when just one page earlier he tells us, "You think anybody cares about you? [...] You should have been an abortion or sold into slavery." But so long as Andy can believe he acts on behalf of defenseless innocents, or to avenge a tragic death, he can justify any atrocity.
Doing so, however, only isolates him further. In the last panel of the issue's introductory present-day framing sequence - a panel that will color our reading of all that follows - Andy complains, "You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, Christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?" Presumably Clowes meant six billion, but the point is made; he's inviting us to read Andy as a figure for a Bush-helmed America which, while claiming to act in everybody's best interests, only turns the rest of the world into its enemies.
Which is not to say this point is always made with subtlety or skill. Clowes deftly connects Andy's superhero fantasies to a post-9/11 victim/revenge mentality through action and implication, but when he has Louie spout, "We're doing it for America!" the theme bears down too heavily. The political critique, sometimes effectively understated, is also sometimes horribly overdetermined.
Clowes's execution falls short of his thematic reach in other areas as well. Despite the chapters' many apparent shifts between different subjects and points of view and levels of fantasy or objectivity, they're all rendered in the same flat, sketchy style and washed-out colors. While these elements are clearly deliberate choices, their uniformity seems especially unequal to the task of differentiating between reality and various types of subjective narration or fantasy. The double-page splash of The Death-Ray striking a criminal needs to be rendered far more dynamically than the panels of slouching high-schoolers - and while the splash is printed in full color, those colors are individually just as dull as the rest of the issue. A more effective satire should be able to match or beat its targets at their own game.
Clowes does deploy a few formal devices more successfully, like the word balloons that are constantly blanked out, cut off by the panel borders, or obscured by Andy's narration - a telling graphic demonstration of Andy's inability to recognize anybody else's problems. The issue's documentary interludes are also effective; although much of the issue appears to be narrated by Andy, the intercuts, especially those of the dead, imply some even more remote and chilling viewpoint.
Other devices, however, like the episodic structure, the chapter headings, and the variations in layout, read like superficial tricks that don't quite disguise the story's fundamental simplicity. This is a straightforward, more or less linear narrative that wants to look like it has a complex structure. (In that sense, the flat style and uniform colors are at least more accurate.)
This is an interesting comic, in many ways a good comic, but not a particularly great comic. (That compliment isn't backhanded - interesting comics, comics that support the variety of readings seen in the discussions of Eightball #23, are almost as rare as great ones.) Reading it after the online discussion had more or less peaked, though, I had to wonder what some of the fanfare was about. Is this issue - bold in its themes, fairly tepid in its execution - really the Second Coming of comics?
Much of the early praise for this issue (Sean Collins being a notable exception) seized on "The Death-Ray" as an indictment of the superhero genre. That's not inaccurate, but it misses the larger and vastly more important political indictment that springs out of Clowes's critique of the superhero mentality - in fact, he seems to criticize that mentality largely as it plays out in geopolitics, not within the comics. Of course, you probably don't care about that if you primarily value this comic to the extent that it licenses your own feelings about the superhero genre.
I would rather not reduce Eightball #23 to a genre critique, not only because its genre-specific critiques are scarcely more original than its teenage outsider characters, but because that would make it just another "alternative" comic that doesn't dare let go of the mainstream against which it defines itself. Nor do I believe any work of art should be judged solely on the merits of how much it tells us what we already think (whether about war and politics or the vastly more serious business of whether superheroes suck or rock!). I happen to think Clowes offers some timely and important arguments - not simply the argument that has dominated the discourse thus far - but his execution doesn't always do them justice.
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