Gotham Calling

Spotlight on Lucky Luke, 1958-1967 – part 2

Posted on May 9, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

As mentioned last week, I’ve been rereading the first decade of René Goscinny’s run on the Belgian series Lucky Luke, illustrated by Morris, and trying to figure out what made those comics work (and why they resonated so much with me when I was younger).

The Black Hills

On the one hand, the books were more comedies than proper parodies, as many of the character traits and situations were droll by themselves, without requiring deep referentiality. Moreover, instead of mocking recognizable narratives, if anything the plots seemed to pay tribute to them. The Wagon Train was a serviceable whodunit set in a caravan headed for California. The excellent The 20^th Cavalry presented a tense escalation of conflict between the cavalry and the Cheyenne. In Calamity Jane, ostensibly separate A and B plots were masterly interwoven before simultaneously paying off at the end.

In fact, after a while, Goscinny’s plots became so elaborate that they sometimes worked almost as ‘pure’ westerns that happened to contain tongue-in-cheek gags. The result was not too dissimilar to films that, while not outright comedies, have a consciously playful vein running through them, such as Destry Rides Again, Ride a Crooked Trail, or Heller in Pink Tights. Hell, if you tone down the deadly violence, spaghetti westerns like Sartana’s Here… Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin – not to mention They Call Me Trinity and its sequels – could practically pass as Lucky Luke entries.

Take The Black Hills, where Lucky Luke is tasked with escorting a scientific expedition into Wyoming in order to prepare the territory for settlement, basically taking over the land controlled by the Cheyenne (‘Let us proclaim that civilization must cross the Black Hills!’). It’s a boisterous adventure full of laughs and thrills, even if the hero is trying to push forward Western settler colonialism and the villains are seemingly trying to prevent it…

The Black Hills

To be fair, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, the senator you see opposing the expedition is just trying to safeguard his own shady business interests (‘He sold guns and alcohol to the Indians, and he was afraid that civilization would ruin his trade…’). Although you can say the Cheyenne, led by Chief Yellow Dog, start out infantilized (in a slightly different way than almost all Lucky Luke characters are infantilized, because playing on existing prejudices), the album makes it clear that a) the Cheyenne have been corrupted by greedy white capitalists, and b) they could ultimately excel at Western notions of institutionalized knowledge (it’s the book’s final punchline).

Rather than looking for a specific moral angle or ideological perspective, though, you can also just approach The Black Hills – and the rest of the series, really – as a whimsical retelling of brutal historical processes, with the primary joke being the very act of making light of them by having everyone involved coming across as utterly silly.

For instance, this is Lucky Luke’s version of North-American imperialism in Mexico:

Tortillas for the Daltons

That said, some of the humor comes down to sheer execution. If you go back to the second scan from The Black Hills, you’ll notice there is a droll progression in the first three panels, amusingly contrasting Lucky Luke’s horse, hat, and demeanor (symbolizing the Wild West) with Washington’s more formal, austere modernity.

You can find plenty of similar gags in the (sort of) sequel, The 20^th Cavalry. There, Yellow Dog is once again tricked by a white guy into declaring war, but he’s not necessarily more foolish than anyone else:

The 20^th Cavalry

The composition in these pages is just one of many examples where the team of Goscinny & Morris came up with effective visual techniques to deliver their jokes… For another example, check out how shifting panel lengths in the sequence below (from Joss Jamon’s Gang) provide the necessary timing and fluidity to sell an apparently simple gag:

Joss Jamon’s Gang

The scene doesn’t stop there. Having established the dynamic of the situation and the geography of the saloon, the page continues in a way that takes advantage of readers’ awareness of these two aspects in order to indirectly suggest what happens off-panel (thus letting us imagine the literal punchline):

Joss Jamon’s Gang

As you can tell by now, saloons are a major setting in Lucky Luke, so Morris’ varied mise-en-scène is also a way to prevent visual boredom…

Below you can find yet another example from Joss Jamon’s Gang, set in this same saloon, later on. It’s a sequence that really nails how thoughtful framing can elevate a joke. Basically, we’re dealing with a classic premise in which a large group of people all have the same reaction at the same time (with one comical exception). Once again, Morris pulls it off through the way he frames the action, underling the collective dimension:

Joss Jamon’s Gang

On the other hand (yep, I’m finally complementing the thought from the beginning of this post), some elements *were* deliberately satirical. For one thing, Lucky Luke painted the Old West through the broadest – and most unflattering – of brushstrokes, conjuring up a whole culture that seemed to largely revolve around stupid, venal men drinking, fighting, and pointlessly killing each other.

This was taken to a surrealist minimalistic extreme in The Escort:

The Escort

Such over-the-top exaggeration may be read as a mere satire of the western genre, itself prone to reduce the final decades of the 19^th century to a limited amount of stock characters and tropes. But it’s also not too much of a stretch to find in the series a satire of America – or even of humanity in general, with its history of violent conflicts, especially over property.

Plenty of stories revolve around land disputes in one way or another. In one album, Lucky Luke sides with farmers against the local cattle breeders (even though he is ostensibly a cowboy himself) and the main source of ridicule is that, in such a heated dispute, putting up a barbed wire fence becomes tantamount to an act of war…

Barbed Wire on the Prairie

René Goscinny was certainly a politicized figure. In 1956, along with Charlier and Uderzo, he called upon Belgian artists to sign a charter to strengthen the professional status of comic creators. In retaliation, the three of them were fired by their publishers. They then created an independent company, Edipresse-Edifrance, and in 1959 founded the magazine Pilote. Named editor-in-chief in 1963, Goscinny changed the magazine’s target audience from children to teenagers – and you can see the same looser, rebellious spirit in his work on Lucky Luke (at the time still being published by the mainstream publisher Dupuis).

In both Joss Jamon’s Gang and The Judge, the criminals become institutionalized, so the (black) comedy derives from a caricature of corrupt, despotic authorities. Joss Jamon’s gang don’t just rob the bank – they take over the bank and, gradually, over every business in Frontier Town. Soon, Jamon decides to become Mayor (‘We’ll expand our empire over the whole state… and maybe, who knows, over the whole country…’), leading to this mockery of democracy:

Joss Jamon’s Gang

(The main joke is rampant authoritarianism, of course, but also the way Morris and Goscinny use the elliptical language of comics… the humor is not just in the situation itself, but in the abrupt transitions.)

One of the effects of the criminals’ rise to power is a curious inversion. Lucky Luke, who is often a straight man/authority figure, comes across in these albums as more of an anarchic Daffy Duck character, sabotaging the (criminal) state. Between the rigged elections, extortionary law enforcement, random arrests, and ridiculously shameless show trials, it’s hardly a stretch to see this as a satire, not just of predatory capitalism, but of the very rise of fascism (in the case of Joss Jamon’s Gang, with the Civil War as a stand-in for World War I). In that sense, Lucky Luke appears here as a force of resistance, ultimately mobilizing the people into carrying out a revolution against their oppressors. (The same goes for the album Billy the Kid, which at the end of the day is also an anti-tyranny parable.)

You get another comedic take on elections in The Oklahoma Land Rush, in which Lucky Luke is assigned with managing the land run of 1899, when settlers were authorized to take over the former Indian Territory. The main joke there, though, is how arbitrary property ownership is… It’s imposed by violence, yet people immediately feel a sense of entitlement:

The Oklahoma Land Rush

It’s a funny album that also takes potshots at familiar targets, like capitalist speculation, overexploitation of natural resources, and dizzying, out-of-control modernity, with urban institutions sprouting at lightning speed (apparently doing justice to the real-life Oklahoma City, which, according to the book’s back matter, within five weeks already had stores, a bank, a daily newspaper… and a graveyard).

And sure, once again, it’s tasteless – to say the least – to discard all the violence committed against the Native Americans killed or expelled from the land, reducing the whole process to a whimsical, friendly negotiation. At least The Oklahoma Land Rush unabashedly acknowledges that it’s a fantasy about a much more benign version of history. In the ironic ending, the real-world victims get the fictional last laugh:

The Oklahoma Land Rush

(If you’ve seen last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon, though, you know this wasn’t a happy ending as much as a new chapter in the Osages’ tragic history…)

Oil digging would itself become the target of satire a few books later. In 1962’s In the Shadow of the Derricks, Lucky Luke gets appointed sheriff of Titusville, Pennsylvania, during a rush for oil in that town. His job is to bring order into a place where everyone has gone crazy with greed and is destroying the environment by digging for oil everywhere (and, yes, the worst of the lot is a law-savvy businessman exploiting the system and using all sorts of dirty tricks to build a monopoly). It’s a wonderfully caricatural album, conjuring up yet another amusingly surreal setting, conveyed by Morris’ cinematic framings:

In the Shadow of the Derricks

Posted in WILD WEST | Tagged Charlier, Lucky Luke, Morris, movies, politics, René Goscinny, Uderzo, western | Leave a comment

COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (6 May 2024)

Posted on May 6, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Given the terrifying escalation of war, nationalism, and climate crisis, to which we can now add mass arrests of students protesting against genocide, it is not surprising that we’re in the midst of a surge of mainstream dystopias, from Civil War to the upcoming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – so it just seems appropriate to pay tribute to the covers of 2000 AD’s golden years with their imagination of weird, monstrous futures:

Posted in AWESOME COVERS | Tagged 2000 AD, Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, Brian Bolland, Carlos Ezquerra, César López, covers, Francisco Solano López, Mike Dorey, science fiction | Leave a comment

Spotlight on Lucky Luke, 1958-1967 – part 1

Posted on May 2, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Once again, it’s that time of year when I revisit Eurocomics that marked my childhood, now read through older eyes, and write about some of the dimensions I missed as a kid. Today, I’ll focus on the first decade of the classic run of the comedy western series Lucky Luke written by the French René Goscinny and illustrated by the Belgian Morris, back in the late 1950s and 1960s, when it was originally published in the anthology magazine Le Journal de Spirou.

The Wagon Train

Lucky Luke went through a tremendous evolution during this run. René Goscinny’s early collaborations with Morris were still fairly basic in terms of plotting. Joss Jamon’s Gang and The Dalton Cousins are mostly a string of gags pitting Lucky Luke against the titular criminal gangs – the former being a band of renegades from the recent Civil War (including a slimy, spineless Peter Lorre lookalike) and the latter the cousins of the Dalton brothers who had died in a previous album (Outlaws).

The Dalton Cousins

The Daltons would end up becoming the series’ most recurrent villains (hell, other than Luke’s horse Jolly Jumper, they’re by far the most recurrent characters!), soon returning to the spotlight, starting with The Dalton’s Escape and On the Dalton’s Trail. The latter album, in fact, pretty much consolidated a classic dynamic: the Daltons escape from prison (usually in a silly way, since prison security is about as tight as in Arkham Asylum) and are chased by Lucky Luke with the ‘help’ of the prison hound dog Rin-Tin-Can (Rantanplan in the original), the dumbest canine of the West (and a jokey take on the German Shepherd/silent cinema star Rin-Tin-Tin) constantly derided by Jolly Jumper (whose sarcastic thoughts we get to read). Joe, the shortest of the Daltons and their de facto leader, became obsessed with getting revenge on Lucky Luke, and Averell, the tallest one, was not only amusingly thick but also frequently hungry.

While specific elements only solidified across time, you can tell Goscinny and Morris knew they’d struck gold as early as The Dalton Cousins. They clearly recognized that these four bandits, with ascending heights and ascending stupidity, lent themselves both to broad humor playing on their dumb meanness and to visual gags playing on their physiques:

The Dalton Cousins

Yet it was in the next album, The Judge, that Lucky Luke really found its groove, taking inspiration from real-life – and folk legend – saloon keeper / justice of the peace Roy Bean. Proclaiming himself ‘the Only Law West of the Pecos,’ Roy Bean had become a popular character whose notion of exercising justice largely consisted of extorting money and condemning people to do his chores. For instance, according to Morris’ introduction: ‘An old folk song tells the story of how ‘the judge’ led an investigation when the body of a man killed in an accident was found. Inspecting the corpse in order to identify him, Bean only found a revolver and 41.5 dollars. He seized the gun and fined the dead man $41.5 for possession of a firearm without a licence…’

With such an eccentric character to build on, Goscinny and Morris had a field day turning the courtroom into something out of a W.C. Fields movie:

The Judge

The Judge is an ode to western mythology. Not only does it expand Roy Bean’s legend, but it ends in a sweet note praising the fun generated by folklore figures like him.

This is more the exception than the rule, though. As much as Morris loved American culture and had grown up idealizing the cowboy lifestyle, he didn’t buy into the romanticization of the Old West myths. If popular culture had a sympathetic take on outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid (while demonizing sheriff Pat Garrett), Lucky Luke set out to ridicule them – and Morris found in Goscinny someone who shared his iconoclasm.

Take Billy the Kid, for instance. Playing with his nickname, the series presented Billy as an actual kid (very quick with the gun but ultimately childish), which led to a spin on The Twilight Zone’s episode ‘It’s a Good Life:’

Billy the Kid

As you can see, Lucky Luke didn’t just take the piss out of the spoiled brat Billy the Kid, but out of the whole subservient town as well. Indeed, the series is a cartoony parody of the whole notion of a country of tough macho men hardened by frontier life: although one of my favorite running gags is how cities always have a badass sign at the entry announcing how deadly they are (‘Stranger, if your intentions are bad, we’ll change your mind… with lead.’), almost all of them turn out to be full of cowards and bumbling fools (it’s essentially the comic book equivalent of Blazing Saddles, albeit with less sex jokes).

One of the albums that takes this to a particularly hilarious extreme is The Daltons Redeem Themselves, where the Daltons get out on parole and find it impossible to go straight because people keep throwing money at them and running away every time they see them! Another one is The Escort, where Lucky Luke has to escort Billy the Kid from Texas to New Mexico for a court hearing, sowing chaos wherever they go because even a handcuffed Billy is enough to scare the crap out of everyone around them…

The Escort is rare in that it is a direct sequel of a previous album. By and large, Goscinny didn’t care about continuity. Lucky Luke’s stories are all self-contained (they always end with Luke riding towards the sunset), follow no chronological order (Luke deals with historical events and figures from the late 19^th century, but the sequence is all over the place), and there are practically no recurring characters other than the Daltons (and certainly no character development), so you can pick up almost any album without concern for what happened before. Hell, the early comics contain multiple references to Jesse James and Calamity Jane that do not match those characters’ later appearances at all, but nobody bothers to explain this inconsistency. The whole thing is a slapstick comedy anyway, so it doesn’t take itself too seriously outside of some internal coherence within each book.

Calamity Jane

Lucky Luke is much kinder towards Calamity Jane than towards Billy the Kid, perhaps in order to compensate for the series’ very poor track record when it came to female characters. Up until 1966, there were virtually no women in significant roles – and the few women that did show up were confined to traditional stereotypes (a brief moment in The Rivals of Painful Gulch actually suggested that women’s peripheral status helped explain why this West was so ‘wild’ and stupid, positing that women were the marginalized voice of reason in a world of feuding and brawling men).

Calamity Jane is one of the albums I most compulsively reread when growing up – in part because I enjoyed seeing Lucky Luke in detective mode, and in part because Calamity Jane herself was such a charismatic figure. Sure, the central joke is precisely how un-ladylike the titular character behaves, so the humor ends up underscoring the exceptionality of Calamity Jane’s boisterous posture, although the album does treat her with sympathy and respect. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the book feminist, but it’s interesting to note that gender expectations are actually a key theme throughout: besides variety among the female cast, there are also quite different types of masculinity (including an effete gentleman modeled after David Niven who undergoes quite an evolution…), thus both celebrating and laughing at diversity.

Gender representation is hardly the only non-PC aspect of René Goscinny’s run. For instance, 1961’s Steaming Up the Mississippi (about a race between two steamboats along the titular river) contains plenty of depictions of outrageously lazy, coward, subservient, minstrel-looking black people, including a cheery guy named Sam whose job is to pour coffee to Ned – ‘the best pilot and liar in the Mississippi’ – every time he tells one of his fanciful stories…

Steaming Up the Mississippi

Seen today, certainly much of the sequence on this scan feels cringeworthy, starting with the (depressingly realistic) way Lucky Luke ignores Sam when walking into the cabin. Sure, it’s a European book taking the piss out of American racism (Look! They even have a black guy whose sole purpose is to serve them coffee!) and the low-level workers’ preference for doing as little as possible can be seen as a form of defiance, with the final panel above even conveying a gentle appreciation of African-American musical culture… but it also taps into awkward tropes about laziness and hedonism.

The fine line between mocking stereotypes and reproducing them has given many a headache to the editors at Cinebook, who have been publishing these comics in English (some of them for the very first time). 2021’s edition of Steaming Up the Mississippi opens with an apologetic forward, including this piece of contextualization:

“Neither Morris nor Goscinny could be accused of deliberate racism. Goscinny was Jewish but kept the fact out of the public eye as much as possible. Only 16 years after the end of the Second World War, he was well aware of the danger of racial or ethnic stereotyping, and his use of such clichés was aimed at disarming and ridiculing them. But both he and Morris were still products of the society they lived in, and even the best-intentioned among us, even now, can be strongly opposed to racism and still not realise the egregious nature of some of our actions, words or attitudes – and the harm they can do to those directly affected by them.”

Cinebook’s team have used the freedom of translation to polish some of the roughest edges while avoiding interventions that drastically change the content. In Steaming Up the Mississippi, Sam now calls the pilot ‘Ned’ rather than ‘boss’ (unlike in the original text), suggesting a relation based on a degree of horizontal complicity rather than mere vertical subservience evocative of slavery. Other books use the more respectful term ‘Native Americans’ when translating the French equivalent of ‘redskins’ (although preserving the constant references to their notoriously low tolerance to alcohol). And if you compare the coloring of Calamity Jane with the one in the French edition (at least with the album I got, which has a few decades), you’ll notice a Chinese character’s skin was originally rendered in a much more dehumanizing bright yellow:

Calamity Jane (French edition)

To be fair, while such terms, stereotypes, and artwork may sound insensitive today, in Lucky Luke they don’t seem informed by malice. These albums are unabashedly cheerful, taking recognizable tropes and exaggerating them to comically outlandish proportions.

In Tortillas for the Daltons, nobody is goofier than the North-American Daltons and Rin-Tin-Can, but the comic also has its fun with broad caricatures of the Mexican as poor, siesta-loving, easygoing peasants:

Tortillas for the Daltons

Other albums did the same with the humble, quaint-speaking Chinese launderers…

The 20^th Cavalry

…and even with the polite, authority-respecting Canadians…

The Daltons in the Blizzard

…not to mention, unsurprisingly, with all kinds of Native Americans, including their allusive names and a vocabulary that often required lengthy descriptions of new objects for which they didn’t previously have a simple term:

The 20^th Cavalry

When it came to the Sioux, the joke was not just to exaggerate their reputation for war (the chief is obsessed with scalps), but also to defang their feared image by presenting each tribe member as a bit of a klutz:

The Wagon Train

The latter gesture culminates in a great sequence that pushes humorous inversion to the next level. The 1964 album The Wagon Train revisits a classic setup, with the Sioux surrounding and attacking a caravan of settlers that rearranges itself into a protective circle. Rather than a scary or dramatic confrontation, however, the book plays the whole thing for laughs as various characters outright refuse to act the part expected of them in traditional narratives…

The Wagon Train

Indeed, if Cinebook decided to publish these albums regardless of their objectionable and possibly upsetting caricatures, it’s probably because of an appreciation for the fact that they are nevertheless outstanding comics in terms of craft… and, often, pretty darn funny.

What made Steaming Up the Mississippi one of my favorite albums as a kid wasn’t the racial dimension but rather Ned’s riotous descriptions of the Mississippi and all the exciting obstacles Lucky Luke had to face in the boat race, from saboteurs to outlandishly sudden floods and droughts (‘The Mississippi’s one fickle old man… One time I saw it rise, then fall so quickly that the fish stayed up in the air before falling and cracking their skulls on the dry riverbed…’).

Heck, for all the outdated stereotypes and occasional forays into black humor, there is still something relatively wholesome about Lucky Luke in the 1950s and ‘60s. Goscinny’s run mocks vices like gambling, brawling, and excessive alcohol consumption while often presenting schools as the ultimate sign of progress.

Crucially, Lucky Luke himself is consistently framed as a somewhat classic, un-deconstructed hero, defending visionaries and/or underdogs. He’s pretty much a straightforward embodiment of the archetype of the brave, lonesome, laconic drifter (even if he occasionally carries out missions for the government).

And yet, he’s not the brooding type. Rather, Luke often seems to be enjoying himself, especially when dealing with Rin-Tin-Can…

The Daltons in the Blizzard

Yep, it’s a far cry from the cynical, gritty anti-heroes of revisionist takes on the genre…

In fact, one of Lucky Luke’s defining features is that he chooses not to kill his opponents (even though he can draw faster than his own shadow, has a pitch-perfect aim, and is pretty good with his fists). This trait may have started out as a concession in order to make the books more kid-friendly, but it generates my favorite kind of stories, where the hero has to constantly *outsmart* the villains.

Steaming Up the Mississippi

The scene above is a running joke throughout the series. Instead of killing each other, Lucky Luke and his opponents constantly deployed ludicrous, non-lethal ways of showcasing their awesome shooting skills.

To be fair, it’s yet another classic setup that has been used in all sorts of westerns and proto-westerns across the decades – and I’m always glad to see new variations on this old motif…

Starlord #12

It’s not just that Lucky Luke doesn’t kill, it’s that his missions typically revolve around instilling morality and protecting – or even helping implement – ‘civilized’ institutions… but this is done in a funny rather than preachy way. René Goscinny isn’t trying to teach you a lesson as much as he’s playing with familiar archetypes, including Luke as the justice-seeking ‘white hat’ cowboy.

Take The Rivals of Painful Gulch. In that album, Lucky Luke arrives at a town where two families – the large-nosed O’Timmins and the big-eared O’Haras – hate each other to death and he agrees to help because their constant fights are ruining the town’s ability to progress (each clan keeps sabotaging every new infrastructure to prevent their rival from benefitting from it). Although the families are obviously Irish caricatures, the tale can be seen as an entertaining parable about racism and prejudice in general. But it also feels like a gloriously wacky counterpoint to Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (which came out two years after this album) – rather than destroying the town’s clans by pitting them against each other, Lucky Luke has to psychologically manipulate them into getting along!

And then, of course, there is the scene from On the Dalton’s Trail where Luke actually saves Joe Dalton from getting lynched…

On the Dalton’s Trail

The key point of the scene is not to romanticize Lucky Luke’s idealism. This is just who he is: standing up for law and order is consistent with his overall characterization. What makes it hilarious is the contrast with the cowardly sheriff, not to mention Joe Dalton’s humiliation (we know how pissed off Jow must be, owing his life to Luke).

Plus, the scene sets up another one, later on, which pushes Joe Dalton’s position to an even more comical extreme:

On the Dalton’s Trail

Next week, I’ll dive a bit deeper into the politics of Goscinny’s run.

Posted in WILD WEST | Tagged Lucky Luke, Morris, politics, René Goscinny, Strontium Dog, western | Leave a comment

COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (29 April 2024)

Posted on April 29, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

This week, a reminder that comic book covers can be FUN:

Posted in AWESOME COVERS | Tagged Alan Grant, Christian Alamy, covers, Erik Larsen, Funnyman, Gary Leach, Gaspar Saladino, Hawkman, House of Mystery, Ira Schnapp, Joe Kubert, José Luis García-López, Lobo, Marvin Stein, Murphy Anderson, Neal Adams, Nikos Koutsis, Savage Dragon, Sid Greene, Space Western, Stan Campbell, Steve Dillon, Strange Adventures, Superman Family, Todd Klein, Unexpected, Warrior | Leave a comment

Some thoughts on Alex Garland’s Civil War

Posted on April 24, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Just some loose thoughts on the Civil War film… No, not the MCU one, I’m talking about the one set in a dystopia where secessionist states are fighting against the US president.

Matt Zoller Seitz has summed up the initial reactions to Civil War: ‘(1) an alternative future history of a divided United States that’s intended as a cautionary tale; (2) a technically proficient but empty-headed misery porn compendium that derives much of its power from images redolent of genocide and/or lynching, but ducks political specifics so as not to offend reactionaries; or (3) a visionary spectacular with ultra-violence that might or might not have something important to say but will definitely look and sound great on an expensive home entertainment system.’

I don’t fully share any of these perspectives. Civil War doesn’t strike me as a cautionary tale as much as the kind the film that, by anticipating some elements of what’s to come, is bound to be remembered and referenced in the same way all those old disaster movies or thrillers about terrorism in New York gained a retroactive resonance after covid-19 or 9/11. As near-future history, though, it’s not particularly believable: if there is a breakdown of the US, it seems more likely to entail deep internal division and conflict between factions within communities (Trump voters live next door, not just in some conveniently separated geographic area) rather than what we see in the film, which is a fairly conventional war between states/military forces.

As is often the case, I find it more interesting to consider how the movie uses past events, as it relocates to the US imagery from wars in Germany, Vietnam, Iraq, etc, so that what seemed remote now seems close and blended. By simultaneously evoking estrangement and recognition, Civil War may perhaps suggest to Americans the feeling of witnessing from the inside those societies’ collapse… or of witnessing such collapse through the outside lens of foreign correspondents. It’s not so much a challenging statement as yet another reminder of how differently Western empathy works towards privileged places in comparison to sites like Gaza.

2000 AD #81

On the picture’s ostensible apolitical stance, i.e. the way it avoids taking sides while emptying the conflict of discernible ideologies and reducing the backstory to vague allusions, well, this is actually something I liked: I went in fearing a preachy polemic, so I found Civil War’s minimalist world-building, close-to-the-ground storytelling, and relatively spare dialogue to be refreshing and stimulating.

The main reason for this choice may have been cynical commercial interest and political cowardice, trying not to alienate too many possible target audiences, but the result is nevertheless thought-provoking. The fact that the ambiguous scenario can be read both ways, as either a revolt against a Trump figure or as a right-wing coalition elevating January 6^th to the next level (the sequence with Jesse Plemons is the only one that conveys clear ideological stakes, but it remains uncertain which side he’s fighting for or if he has just gone rogue) signals the political confusion and the very unpredictability of our current moment.

Likewise, by exploiting and sensationalizing graphic violence, including that of real-world tragedies, the film reflects the attitude of the central characters, a group of desensitized reporters more concerned with thrills and aesthetics than with the political implications or the actual suffering they depict. If Civil War is about anything, it’s about the cold distance of sensationalist war-related journalism, which is not to say that it has anything new or deep to say… Indeed, more than the superficial politics, I was struck by the superficial take on photojournalism, with everybody treating photos as if they don’t have angles or meanings or points of view – they’re just ‘great’ when they look impressive and shocking.

Scout Handbook

This brings us to (3), that is to say, to the notion that Civil War is best appreciated as a visceral rather than cerebral experience, providing a string of perversely entertaining set pieces, enhanced by the provocative context but not necessarily at its service. Unlike what the poster and trailer might suggest, this is not a dumb blockbuster drawing on obvious American icons to stage a relentless orgy of spectacular action and large-scale destruction but rather something closer in style to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Still, it’s a tense, immersive road movie where every stop involves a new mystery and obstacle, so the most satisfying way to enjoy it is perhaps on a moment-by-moment basis, hanging out with these characters instead of theorizing about the bigger picture.

This matches my general approach to Alex Garland, whom I think consistently uses ambitious high concepts to fuel moody yet functional genre pieces, frustrating those in search of insightful science fiction while rewarding those (like me) for whom the smart elements are a bonus adorning stylish sci-fi adventures. So, underneath the Tarkovsky veneer, just as 28 Days Later was a post-apocalyptic zombie flick, Sunshine a slasher in outer space, Dredd a cyberpunk action fest, Ex Machina a chamber piece psychological thriller, Annihilation a – flawed yet compelling – slow-burn monster-hunting shooter, Devs a spy-fi yarn, and Men a psychedelic body horror riff (which eventually loses its way precisely by pushing the allegorical dimension), Civil War boils down to a solid war movie with an edgy twist.

The thing is that, even with adjusted expectations, Garland’s film is neither particularly original in terms visuals nor especially involving in terms of characterization (despite the nice performances, in particular Kirsten Dunst, who comes across as truly broken and tired). The notion of the US as a modern battlefield was memorably mined in the preposterously silly Red Dawn, forty years ago, and you can find much more complex, fleshed out war correspondents in Under Fire, to cite two of Gotham Calling’s top Cold War films.

East of West #1

I get why some viewers – especially critics – would demand more. A24 productions have such a serious, pretentious tone that they keep hinting towards something sophisticated and meaningful, yet not always living up to that promise. Recently, the company was behind Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s controversial historical drama about the domestic family life of Auschwitz’s commandant (whose house was right next to the concentration camp), which actually has a few points of contact with Civil War: both thematize people’s ability to accept and coexist with carnage; both eschew exposition-laden conversations, relying heavily on – and ultimately exploring – our own previous understanding of the world (even if Zone of Interest keeps the Holocaust’s physical violence offscreen, poignantly dramatizing the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ inclination, while Civil War shamelessly recreates that violence, illustrating how even images of death and pain come to be accepted).

By now, we’ve all seen countless versions of the destruction of the United States, many of them much more imaginative than what you find here. For instance, the maps I’ve used in this post come from comics that did it in a more maximalist – and surrealist – fashion. I find them all very cool and fun, but I suppose what sets Civil War apart, at the end of the day, is precisely its low-key vibe, as if underlining how mundane and increasingly familiar this prospect has come to feel.

I’m certainly not the first to point out that apocalyptic fiction has become less and less futuristic. Then again, as Ursula K. Le Guin put it as far back as 1969, in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, classic sci-fi has always tended to be more descriptive than predictive: ‘The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like – what’s going on – what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look!’

Give Me Liberty #4

Posted in WEBS OF FICTION | Tagged 2000AD, Alex Garland, Civil War, East of West, Judge Dredd, Martha Washington, movies, politics, science fiction, Scout | Leave a comment

COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (22 April 2024)

Posted on April 22, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Another reminder that comic book covers can be awesome… and another tribute to renditions of facial acting and the art of the close-up:

Posted in AWESOME COVERS | Tagged Al Gordon, Al Hartley, Alan Davis, Alpha Flight, Brave and the Bold, covers, Daniel Clowes, Daredevil, David Mazzucchelli, DNAgents, Eightball, Excalibur, Frank Giacoia, Inferior 5, Ira Schnapp, Irv Novick, Jack Adler, Jeff Lemire, Joe Giella, John Byrne, José Villarrubia, Misty, Mitch Schauer, Patsy Walker, Paul Neary, Phantom, Sam Rosen, Stan Goldberg | Leave a comment

Some thoughts on 21st-century spy shows

Posted on April 17, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Secret agents and international intrigue have really come back with a vengeance in the past decade or so. The War on Terror and, later, the renewed tension between the West and Russia seem to have stimulated the public’s appetite for this sort of material, now updated to an era where surveillance technology makes some of the old spy-fi devices appear quaint in comparison.

When it comes to smart entertainment that mixes intricate plots, engaging characterization, and ripped-from-the-headlines geopolitics, the biggest juggernauts were Homeland (2011-2020) and The Bureau (2015-2020). I was particularly fond of the latter, a neo-noirish narrative about a division of the French Secret Services specialized in cover stories, or ‘legends,’ weaving a tapestry of missions involving a million different political forces in the Middle East.

Elegantly emanating le Carré-esque reservation and authenticity, The Bureau’s main emphasis was on the low-key aspects of spycraft (dissimulation, psychological manipulation, technological surveillance), although this was often tied to the violence on the ground, particularly in the war against ISIS. In fact, the action became more visually daring as the series progressed, including a number of remarkable set pieces (the Israeli hit squad in the hotel corridor, the wall-breaking operation through a ravaged Mosul…). Things got especially grim in the final season, with a string of crushing moments and broken characters (yet also much more sex).

It is worth noting that a few smaller productions were just as solid, like 2021’s Vigil, which pursued a mystery set in a nuclear submarine. Alas, the second season (a new mystery, now largely set in a Persian Gulf base and revolving around combat drones) was much less impressive…

At the moment, the finest specimen of this breed is probably The Diplomat, which revolves around the US ambassador in the UK trying to prevent the British from going to war in the Middle East (a nice historical twist, cleverly playing on post-Iraq/Afghanistan wars, post-Trump, and post-Brexit anxieties). The Diplomat was created by Debora Cahn, who brings in the craft she honed scripting The West Wing and Homeland into yet another political thriller that takes for granted the audience’s familiarity with government workings and contemporary hot topics while pitting a bunch of charismatic characters against each other in complex games of diplomacy and intelligence (in both senses of the word). Geopolitics have really caught up with this one, though, so I’m guessing the next season will take place in some kind of alternate reality where their ersatz-Prigozhin can remain alive and where genocidal war in the Middle East remains a looming threat rather than a consummated fact.

If The Diplomat has more of a sitcom vibe, the same goes for another one of my favorites among the latest crop of spy shows. Slow Horses focuses on an MI5 unit made up almost entirely out of second-rate agents who have screwed up in the past. To be sure, with source material as good as Mick Herron’s novels, all you have to do is try to stay relatively faithful, breathing life into the various eccentric characters and witty dialogue, even if necessarily sacrificing the text’s droll descriptions (‘The minister at the time had been every senior spook’s wet dream: spineless, indecisive, terrified of bad press, and anxious never to be caught in the vicinity of a decelerating buck.’). Still, it would be unfair to reduce the show to a serviceable adaptation – it has developed its own groove and rhythm (helped by Mick Jagger’s absolutely kickass theme song). It also has a stellar cast, starting with Gary Oldman as the team’s outrageously abusive boss, Jackson Lamb.

Since Oldman played the spymaster George Smiley in 2011’s film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it is hard not to see his performance on an intertextual level – Lamb is like a dark reflection of Smiley, more vulgar and certainly less diplomatic, but likewise exhibiting the sharpness of an old cold warrior. And I reckon it’s not the only nod to the genre’s past: the second season opens in a porn shop (like Conrad’s Secret Agent) and contains a leg-torture scene (like Inglourious Basterds), even though it drops much of the novel’s Die Hard-ish subplot.

That season, in fact, does more streamlining than the first one, trailing further away from Herron and actually replacing a few key twists. Overall, I don’t mind: the changes actually made it a more stimulating viewing experience for me, as I had read the book (Dead Lions) and so I got to enjoy a story with some extra surprises. That said, I did miss the novel’s lovely denouement, where sleeper agents become a sort of metaphor for immigration and integration. (It was also a pity that the next season omitted the very final scene of the third novel, Real Tigers, one of Lamb’s most badass moments…)

Overall, these are good times for aficionados of cool spy fiction. Even if you want something less concerned with geopolitics than with the escapist dimension of accessing a secret underworld operating in the shadows of our mundane life, there is plenty to choose from. Those that lean towards sci-fi can enjoy intelligent hybrids thanks to the likes of Counterpart (what I wouldn’t give for a third season…) or even Andor. For those who prefer a more playful tone, there’s the mellow indie romcom Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024), not to mention the twisted cat-and-mouse games of Killing Eve (2018-2022).

The latter, about an obsessive hunt across Europe for a psychopathic hitwoman, had a steady supply of neat needle drops and stylish directorial choices (like the intense dance floor attack in the third episode or the tracking shot at the beginning of season 2) to go along with the zippy writing. The result was so darkly funny – and, sure, sometimes just plain dark – that it’s no wonder the initial showrunner Phoebe Waller-Bridge was hired to polish the script for No Time to Die (that film is quite a mixed bag, but you can sense Waller-Bridge’s mark in the very fun sequence in Cuba).

In this regard, last year’s Citadel is probably the one that took things farthest. This is as superficial a genre piece as you are likely to find, following ultra-secret agencies (for whom the CIA and the MI6 are ‘minor leagues’) involved in a shadow war that has shaped modern human history, which we get to uncover through the eyes of an amnesiac super-agent forced back in the game. The show feels like what would happen if you gave a very generous budget to a screenwriter whose whole only knowledge of the world came from Bond, Bourne and M:I movies… In fact, it covers pretty much the same ground and plot shenanigans as the recent film comedy Argyle, but whereas there the stale, broad humor was loudly telegraphed and insultingly hammered home at every turn (except for a bit of inspired lunacy towards the end), Citadel isn’t necessarily pitched to the lowest common denominator… For every piece of dialogue that resembles a placeholder, there are enough moments when the show seems to be giddily testing how far it can push its circuitous narrative, demanding attention rather than mere recognition.

I don’t mind the derivative aspects, which Citadel pulls off with gusto, bombarding us with high-pitched action (especially John Woo-ish gun fu), quippy exchanges (full of f-boms, giving it an even more adolescent flair), and an extra twist always waiting around the corner. Compared to any of the other shows I mentioned, however, there is very little to hold on to in terms of emotionally engaging characterization or any connection at all to the outside world… The agents’ globetrotting adventures take them from one postcard location to the next, but they are so removed from actual ideologies or international affairs that the whole thing becomes quite abstract, as if emptying espionage of everything except for pulpy thrills. The result is pure, trashy, disposable fun.

It’s exactly the sort of breezy take on super-spies you can find in Dynamite’s James Bond 007 comics, including the recent books written by Philip Kennedy Johnson (which strongly benefit from the nifty colors of Dearbhla Kelly, Francesco Segala, and Claudia Giulani):

James Bond 007 – For King and Country #2

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged Citadel, Claudia Giuliani, Dearbhla Kelly, espionage, Francesco Segala, Homeland, James Bond, Killing Eve, movies, Philip Kennedy Johnson, politics, science fiction, Slow Horses, The Bureau, The Diplomat | Leave a comment

COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (15 April 2024)

Posted on April 15, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

This week, a reminder that X-Men comics can be surprisingly meaningful and morally complex… but also very, very horny. It’s right there on the covers: